Daniel Pietzsch

March 2018 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 16:25:46 +0200

March 2018 – Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal:

I’m lagging behind a bit with my journal entries. But here’s March.

Photo

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 09:30:18 +0100

One rainy afternoon in December at the Radschlägermarkt (flea...

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 21:12:41 +0100

From the hip

Carrots

Integrated umbrella-and-bag carrying system

Still getting used to a rangefinder’s parallax error, I suppose.

Voll funktionsfähig!

One rainy afternoon in December at the Radschlägermarkt (flea market).

Street photography workshop in Vienna

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 18:17:05 +0100

In November I flew to Vienna, Austria for a street photography workshop with Severin Koller.

I thought about it for a while before making the booking, because I thought it’s maybe a little decadent to do so. But Nicole quickly convinced me by saying something along the lines of: “You only live once. You like his photos a lot. Go, do it!”. So I booked the workshop, flights and accommodation.

Unfortunately, and to my surprise, the workshop was cancelled two days beforehand and one day before my flight on Tuesday. But lucky me, Severin contacted me directly and suggested to do a workshop just for me. Instead of the originally scheduled 3 days, the workshop took place on two days – one day meeting and shooting and one day in the darkroom. But that was absolutely fine with me, now that I got an exclusive one-on-one training.

So, here are my impressions from these days in Vienna. One roll was shot on my Olympus Trip 35, but most photos were taken with a Canon Canonet G-III QL-17. The films were either Ilford HP-5 Plus, Kodak Tri-X or Ilford FP-4. The rolls were developed in Xtol 1+1 and scanned with the Epson V200.

Moonlight

Café Wirr with Severin’s Vienna-Mag hanging on the walls.

It was cold!

On Thursday, the first day of the workshop, we met at Café Ritter, had coffees and got to know each other. We then went out, walked on and around Mariahilferstraße and shot quite a few frames before having an early dinner.

First meetup with Severin at Café Ritter.

This one got printed.

On Friday, I was walking the streets on my own.

Find the pigeon.

This one got printed, too.

Also printed!

At a photo exhibition at the Albertina.

On Saturday, I followed Severin’s recommendation and went to the “Brunnenmarkt”, a busy, multicultural food market.

Ranting drunk.

The cool meat gang.

“Host an Tschick?”

Schule ist scheisse!

🎶🎶 Ding 🎶 Ding Ding Ding 🎶 Ding Ding Ding 🎶🎶Ding Ding 🎶 Ding Ding Ding 🎶🎶 Ding Ding 🎶 Ding 🎶 Ding 🎶 Ding 🎶 Ding 🎶🎶

On Sunday it was time to meet again. We spent a whole day in the darkroom, developing the 7 rolls of film I had shot, made contact prints, chose the photos we wanted to print, and then actually printed them.

To me, it was fascinating to create prints in a complete analog workflow. Especially watching the printing-paper slowly fade in and reveal the image in the chemical bath was just magic. And the quality is amazing!

Severin hanging negative to dry.

Selecting negative strips to prepare for a contact sheet.

Washing the final prints.

The prints had to wash overnight, so we met one last time on Monday, my last day in Vienna. Severin handed me my washed and dried prints, gave me a signed copy of his Vienna-Magazine and we had a last drink together.

I spent my remaining hours in Vienna at the Prater. But the rain never stopped and so there was not much going on and it was just wet. I still took a few photos, before it was time to make my way back home to Düsseldorf.

My prints and a “Verlängerter” at Café Europa.

Bye bye Vienna!

Horizontal rain.

In the end, I’m very glad I attended the workshop. I learned a lot and had a great time. Thanks again @severinkoller, for making it happen despite the cancellation of the original workshop!

P.S.: How many hats did you count? ;-)

Developing my first roll of 35mm film

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 15:52:38 +0100

Last week, I’ve been developing and scanning my first roll of 35mm film. I’m going to share some thoughts on this process and of course, I’m going to share some of the photos.

All the black and white photos shown here were shot using my Nikon FE with a 50mm E-Series lens on a beautiful and relatively warm Sunday afternoon two weeks ago in Düsseldorf. The film was a black and white Ilford HP5 Plus.

Developing

Drying film roll

The developing was a bit of a daunting task, since I didn’t want to screw up and ruin the film – either by accidentally exposing the film to light, or by making a mistake during the developing process using the chemicals.
So, I first spent some time to read about how to develop a black and white film and also watched a couple of YouTube videos. And ultimately, I found a PDF from Ilford’s website to be the best guide. Although, I specifically developed an Ilford film – a HP5 Plus – I think this PDF would be helpful regardless of the film.

Here some resources I found helpful:

Ilford: Producing your first black & white film (PDF)
Ilford: film processing chart (PDF)
Ilford website on black and white photography
FilmDev.org: Developing recipes. A good resource to see how other people are developing their films and for reassuring yourself that you’re doing the right thing.
Loading 35mm Film onto Plastic or Stainless Steel Reels - YouTube
How to Develop Black and White Film from Start to Finished Results - YouTube

Lots going on

So, the first step was to get the film onto the reel.
After I shot the film, I didn’t wind back the film completely, so the leader was still outside. This gave me the option not having to crack open the roll in the dark and thus having to handle all steps in complete darkness. Since the leader was out, I could insert the first bit of the film into the reel with the lights on.

Winding the film onto the reel was quite fiddly, and I didn’t quite manage to get it on there as shown in the videos. But eventually, I got it on there by simply pushing the film in bit by bit.

It was definitely summer for this guy

Then, I had to develop the film in four steps:

Developing it with the Rodinal-solution (Adox Adonal).
Stopping development with a stop bath.
Fixing the film (using a Adox Adofix solution).
Washing (and using Adox Adolfo wetting agent at the final rinse).

The Rodinal developer

For each process, I used a chemical solution, and all of them had to be tempered to roughly 20°C. It was a bit tedious to prepare all the solutions and especially maintaining them at 20°. But as I found out later, you probably don’t really need the chemicals for steps 2. and 4. And keeping all solutions at 20 degrees seems not to be too important, either. So next time, I’ll try without the chemicals for these steps and just use water.

And, what I should have done after washing (the last step), is wipe the whole film with a sponge to get rid of any remaining solution residues and also to get rid of the first few dust particles that might have already settle onto the film.

Then it was time for drying for which I just hung the strip over the bath tub.

On last word of caution: you should be aware that these chemicals are not harmless. I had a lightly irritated eye a bit later, probably from the solution fumes. So take care with those chemicals!

Watching football

Scanning

To be able to scan the images, I had to cut the film-strip into sets of six images, so they fit into the scanner’s tray. Pretty easy. Just use regular scissors.

Scanning the negatives

The scanning itself was pretty straight forward, too. I used a Epson Perfection V200 Photo scanner. The Software – “Epson Scan” – automatically recognises the individual images and it’s just a matter of choosing the resolution and file-format you want. I chose JPEG with 600 dpi for a 10x15cm target format, which gives me 8.7 megapixel images.

What I can recommend – and what I didn’t do right from the beginning – is to examine the negatives once again before putting them into the scanner and wiping them with a dry and clean cloth. This should get rid of any new dust.

Here are two helpful resources for the scanning process:

Film Grains Meet Digital Pixels: A Complete Guide to Scanning Film | Photojojo
Film Scanner Lite iOS App to examine the negatives.

Conclusion

And that’s it.

Overall, it was not really difficult to develop the film. And next time I’ll probably be considerably faster, since I’ll be more familiar with the process, and – as I said – will skip preparing the stop-bath solution.

So, I’m going to do this again. Especially since I really enjoy the whole workflow.
It’s really different to shoot film. I tend to shoot more deliberate, and also pay more attention to composition right away. There’s the suspense having to wait for your photos and not knowing how they turned out. And in the end there are way less photos to edit. And, I think I end up with a much higher percentage of “keepers”. And of course, I like the look of film.

Steal Your Soul – (Street) Photography Blog

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 15:07:02 +0100

Steal Your Soul – (Street) Photography Blog:

Nice street photoblog by Bruno Trematore. Lot’s of good photos of Düsseldorf as well!

50/365: The Street Photographer’s Manual.I’ve pretty much read...

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 01:07:42 +0100

50/365: The Street Photographer’s Manual.

I’ve pretty much read and looked through this now. It’s a good book. It’s a mix of showing you techniques you can use on the street and introductions to photographers.

While the choice of photographers is a little iN-PUBLIC-biased (the author David Gibson is himself a member of this collective), I still enjoyed it a lot – especially for the introduction or re-introduction to great photographers and their different styles. Recommended!

33/365: I was coming around a corner, when the guy on the right...

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 18:40:00 +0100

33/365: I was coming around a corner, when the guy on the right just got out of the supermarket, re-joining his two co-workers that have been waiting for him. They started walking my way for 200 meters or so. And that’s when I made this photo.