Free Unicare film developed in B&W chemistry

trican

Hi all,

Out of cursiousity I developed a roll of the free Unicare colour C41 film in B&W chemistry. I used semi-stand development for 1 hour with a 1:100 Rodinal Special mix @20C. I was pleasantly surprised to see there are developed pictures on the roll, albeit they look dark. Though when I scanned them in, they don't look half bad, quite grainy mind. I'll post some later if anyone is interested.


But I think my scanner (or rather the auto film feed) is getting confused by the developed film, as the individual frames are not being properly aligned, e.g. I'm getting 3/4 of one picture and 1/4 of another picture. I dont see anyway of adjusting this within my Epson software and whilst I played with Vuescan I couldn't quite figure out how to resolve it there?

Anyone have any comments?

trishw78

Now that quite an interesting experiment I'll wait and see what your shots look like before I try it myself. I would have thought it couldn't be done.

On the scanner problem could it be that because your shots are dark that it' can't tell where one frame ends and the next begins?

melekalikimaka

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_scar/3093300451/

wow did a google
looks awesome, almost lith looking

Fajitas!

It can be done easily enough, I've often used a bit of bleach in too.

It does come out VERY grainy - The 200 speed looks like it's been pushed about 4 stops.

Are you trying to scan the pictures as colour or B&W? I'm not too up on the automatic film feeder, but I think it tries to reconize frames from the markings along the film's edges, and can't find them with the shift in tones. Possibly!?

artyeva

melekalikimaka wrote: »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_scar/3093300451/

wow did a google
looks awesome, almost lith looking

this is a nice example of colour slide film developed with b+w chemistry alright.

trican - can't wait to see what the unicare film looks like.

DaireQuinlan

Yeah it'll be fairly dark, they always come out looking pretty dense. Part of this is down to the magenta mask on the C-41 stock, part of it is due to the fact that you have (at least) 3 different silver layers. They all get bleached and replaced by differently coloured dye layers when you develop. I'd be inclined to use normal Rodinal if I was doing a 1:100 stand development aswell. Though I've never used Rodinal special, AFAIK its completely different. Studional in the states IIRC.

You scanning on a flatbed ? My canon 8600 if I'm using vuescan scans the entire strip for the preview , then I have to select a crop area which it scans at whatever the full resolution is. So If I have a strip of 120 I go back to the preview each time and just pick a different crop, scan at full res, and save out.

trican

Daire as you seem quite the film guru, do you think in this case doing the semi-stand development was a good idea instead of a regular agitation based development?

Its definitely dark and dense, but there are decent quality photos on it, which I'll upload a couple of examples when I get home from work. Yip using a flat bed scanner, and while I get the preview I typically get about 3/4 of one frame and 1/4 of another. I dont think I can merge the missing quarter from the next frame in Vuescan? I played around with the offset parameter - but without much luck.

thanks!

trishw78

Fajitas! wrote: »

It does come out VERY grainy - The 200 speed looks like it's been pushed about 4 stops.

just wondering would it be worth your while possilbe pull the film 4 stops when developing it then, or would there be too much loss of image

Buzz Lightyear

This definitely sounds interesting. I've thought about it but just haven't gotten arount to trying it. Be very interested to see the results.
@trish - could be worth trying - I might give that a go at the weekend. Might just shoot and dev in two halfs. One normal the other pulled.

As for the scanner. Al gave a tip a while ago which I use as I haven't got a scanner - Shoot it with your cam against a white background. I use the shower rail in the bathroom to hang the negs to dry, then shoot using the tiles as the background (they're far enough away not to see the joins and white).

Cheers all.

Ghost Train

Buzz Lightyear wrote: »

As for the scanner. Al gave a tip a while ago which I use as I haven't got a scanner - Shoot it with your cam against a white background. I use the shower rail in the bathroom to hang the negs to dry, then shoot using the tiles as the background (they're far enough away not to see the joins and white).

Cheers all.

I was doing somethng similar for a while, what i did was use an lcd screen, Ipod, laptop or similar. As long a the screen is back a bit and out of focus the pixels won't show up. Can be full screen blank white image or making it light cyan can help correct for film colour (at least for negitives). Bought a scanner eventually.

trican

check out the first 8 samples on my flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danlarkin/

There is a mix of b&w and colour scanning, but the scanning is being very temperamental - also the sharpness is being effected, not sure whether its due to the development process or the scanning.

JOHN_70

some of those are pretty good. Convert the ones with color cast to B&W maybe. Will definitely be giving that a go myself.

DaireQuinlan

trican wrote: »

Daire as you seem quite the film guru, do you think in this case doing the semi-stand development was a good idea instead of a regular agitation based development?

Pfff. I'm far from a film guru. OTOH I have probably ruined more rolls of film in the cause of experimentation than a lot of other people ...
The one time I did C-41 in B&W I just used regular rodinal 1:100 and an hour stand. I think if you haven't got a clue what time/dev/concentration to use then full stand with rodinal probably at least has a chance of giving you a usable image. If you wanted to repeat it more than once I'd probably experiment with a regular developer and nail the best time and developer mix for the job. I don't really think C-41 in B&W has anything more than curiousity value. I've never really been enamoured of the look. It's like crossing print film in E-6, people rarely do it more than once

Its definitely dark and dense, but there are decent quality photos on it, which I'll upload a couple of examples when I get home from work. Yip using a flat bed scanner, and while I get the preview I typically get about 3/4 of one frame and 1/4 of another. I dont think I can merge the missing quarter from the next frame in Vuescan? I played around with the offset parameter - but without much luck.

Hmmm. Your epson behaves differently than my canon flatbed then. The epson drivers must deliver a different data stream up to vuescan. Vuescan using the canon, as I explained above, gives me the full scan area, and I manually crop to each frame myself, so there's no registration problems. There might be an 'advanced' mode or something on your epson software that enables this.