Friday, April 11, 2025

"Retro Film" - Processing colour film as black and white

In learning "retro film" we do tests with stills cameras. It is a quick way to test different films and processes. So these still photos really do relate to film-making.





I can sometimes buy 16mm colour shortends, the unexposed remaining parts of big rolls of film. The colour process is a big challenge and I am focussing on black and white. How does processing colour film as b/w work out?

I got my Kodak Retina 1B out of storage. This is a classic camera from about 1954. It had a partly exposed roll of Kodak Gold 200 in it. I shot some more then processed as black and white in Ilford LC29 diluted 1+19 for 13 min at 20 degC. A usual time for LC29 is 8 min. I read somewhere to give more time to colour film and that seems to have worked. 

Now on the TODO list, film something creative with those shortends! As in short comedy sketches which act as team-building test runs for our mad idea of competing in the 48 Hours film-making competition using retro film.




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