lots of color firsts for me

[tmbg]

I got a big box o' chemistry from freestyle yesterday. In it was an E-6 kit, a C-41 kit, and an RA-4 kit, all Arista.

I had a roll of velvia 50 and a roll of 160VC that I shot through my m645, mostly just trying to photograph things with a lot of color. It's been drab and overcast here lately, so I kinda had to work at getting good colors.

Anyway, I ran the two rolls of film, and both came out quite nice!

I don't have a scanner, so I'm getting into some bizarre "mixed media" here, but here are a couple pictures of the E-6 slides, and a picture of projecting one of them with my enlarger:







I'm projecting it onto a bare wood tabletop, and the texture in that last picture is wood grain.


Lastly, I tried printing one of the frames off the roll of 160VC. It took some fiddling with the filters as I expected, and I didn't get it quite exactly right. It's still got a bit of a yellow cast, but it came out pretty good!



The colors aren't quite as saturated as I'd like, but it's a start!


You'll note that print is borderless... I usually print with a speed easel and get bordered prints. Unfortunately, the endura paper i got is slightly too large to fit in my speed easel! Has anyone had that issue? For that print, I cropped and focused on an 8x10 piece of cardboard, and then gently lined the paper up on top of the cardboard to print. That had to be done in the dark, of course.

I'm tray developing at room temp using the arista chemistry, and the results are decent. I tried doing it under amber safelight, but my prints came out with a pretty substantial blue cast.

[Greg Davis]

You cannot develop RA4 under a safelight unless it is specifically for color. You need a #13 filter or use a Thomas Duplex with the DUC filters installed.

[tiberiustibz]

Safelights for color only work if they're too dim to see anything, and hence to dim to fog anything.

My best results have been 160VC and Ektar 100 on Supra Endura using room temp Kodak (developer) Replenisher RT and blix.

from that print it looks like your contrast is high. You might try overexposure of your negatives or altering print chemistry (sodium sulfite IIRC???) to correct it, knowing that your color will change. You can also try shooting lower contrast scenes.