film

92 Articles

three resin-printed Single8 film cartridges, uncropped image

Re-Inventing The Single 8 Home Movie Format

November 23, 2023 by 22 Comments

[Jenny List] has been reverse-engineering and redesigning the Single8 home movie film cartridge for the modern age, to breathe life into abandoned cine cameras.

One of the frustrating things about working with technologies that have been with us for a while is the proliferation of standards and the way that once-popular formats can become obsolete over time.  This can leave equipment effectively unusable and unloved.

There is perhaps no greater example of this than in film photography – an industry and hobby that has been with us for over 100 years and that has left many cameras orphaned once the film format they relied on was no longer available (Disc film, anyone?).

Thankfully, Hackaday’s own [Jenny List] has been working hard to bring one particular cine film format back from the dead and has just released the fourth instalment in a video series documenting the process of resurrecting the Single8 format cartridge. Continue reading “Re-Inventing The Single 8 Home Movie Format” →

Sometimes It’s Worth Waiting: Kodak Finally Release Their Super 8 Camera

November 23, 2023 by 32 Comments

Think of all those promised products that looked so good and were eagerly awaited, but never materialized. Have you ever backed a Kickstarter project in the vain hope that one day your novelty 3D printer might appear? Good luck with the wait! But sometimes, just sometimes, a product everyone thought was dead and gone pops up unexpectedly.

So it is with Kodak’s infamous new Super 8 camera, which they announced in 2018 and had the world of film geeks salivating over, then went quiet on. It’s abandoned, we all thought, and then suddenly five years later it isn’t. If you really must have the latest in analog film-making gear, you can put your name down to order one now.

Continue reading “Sometimes It’s Worth Waiting: Kodak Finally Release Their Super 8 Camera” →

Spuds Lend A Hand In The Darkroom

October 5, 2023 by 10 Comments

If film photography’s your thing, the chances are you may have developed a roll or two yourself, and if you’ve read around on the subject it’s likely you’ll have read about using coffee, beer, or vegetable extracts as developer. There’s a new one to us though, from [cm.kelsall], who has put the tater in the darkroom, by making a working developer with potatoes as the active ingredient.

The recipe follows a fairly standard one, with the plant extract joined by some washing soda and vitamin C. The spuds are liquidised and something of a watery smoothie produced, which is filtered and diluted for the final product. It’s evidently not the strongest of developers though, because at 20 Celcius it’s left for two hours to gain an acceptable result.

The chemistry behind these developers usually comes from naturally occurring phenols in the plant, with the effectiveness varying with their concentration. They’re supposed to be better for the environment than synthetic developers, but sadly those credentails are let down somewhat by there not being a similar green replacement for the fixer, and the matter of a load of silver ions in the resulting solutions. Still, it’s interesting to know that spuds could be used this way, and it’s something we might even try ourselves one day.

We’ve even had a look at the coffee process before.

Large Format Photos Without The Large Price Tag

September 9, 2023 by 37 Comments

There’s a good reason that the go-to format for most film photographers is 35 mm, in that it provides a mix of convenience and cost. Shooting huge large-format negatives in the style of a 19th-century photographer can return astounding pictures with detail and lens effects unavailable on relatively tiny cameras, but it’s hardly the most convenient or cheapest medium. [Amos Chapple] may have a way to cut those costs though, by using a digital camera to capture the image projected by the camera onto a screen where the film would otherwise be.

He’s following in the footsteps of a Ukrainian photographer who tried the same technique photographing the projected image from the lens side, but that approach gave disappointing results due to the offset angle. Instead he’s placing the camera behind a translucent screen, having his DSLR behind a sheet of waxed paper held at the focal plane.

The results are we’d have to say, stunning. The old Soviet Ukrainian camera he’s using is something of a beast, but his photos of dancers at a folk festival have that other-worldly look to them which might well have something form the 1890s about it. We like it a lot and perhaps it’s tempting to fashion a poor-mans version using a cardboard box, and try for ourselves. Long-time readers will know it’s not the only attempt to digitize a large format camera we’ve seen.

Photography Goes Leaf Green

August 28, 2023 by 4 Comments

Something that haunts film photographers is the prospect of a film shortage. This won’t replace film in that event, but [Applied Science] demonstrates photography using leaves. That’s right, a plant can record an image on its leaves.

Anyone with a high-school level of education can tell you that the leaf is a solar energy harvester, with the green chlorophyll using CO2 scavenged from the air to make sugars in the presence of light. It stands to reason that this light sensitivity could be used to capture images, and indeed if you place a leaf in the dark for an extended period of time its chlorophyll fades away where there is no light. The technique described in the video below the break is different though, and much more sensitive than the days-long exposures required to strip chlorophyll. It relies on starch, which the leaf uses to store energy locally when it has an excess of light. Continue reading “Photography Goes Leaf Green” →

A Time-Lapse Film, Not A Time-Lapse Video

August 19, 2023 by 7 Comments

We’re used to time-lapse photography being merely a feature of our smartphone camera app, but of course it has its origins in film. A movie camera would be triggered frame by frame at fixed intervals, with the result being the timelapse. A dead art, you might wonder, were it not for [Kevin Santo Cappuccio], who is capturing his work in timelapse on 16mm film, with a vintage Bolex camera.

For those of us with a penchant for film the camera alone makes it worth a second look, but the actuation mechanism is at the heart of the project. It uses a slightly unusual but nevertheless strangely ubiquitous actuator, in the form of a car door central locking actuator. This in turn is triggered by an Arduino Nano, and he has the ultimate dream of using a 16mm film timelapse as part of a fully-16mm submission video for the Hackaday prize.

We think it’s a pity that more film-based projects don’t end up on these pages, so we’re very pleased indeed to see this one. If you’re curious about the other side of the 16mm system, well we’ve introduced you to the inner workings of a projector before, too.

Polaroid Develops Its Pictures Remotely

August 16, 2023 by 8 Comments

For those who didn’t experience it, it’s difficult to overstate the cultural impact of the Polaroid camera. In an era where instant gratification is ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when capturing a photograph meant waiting for film to be developed or relying on the meticulous art of darkroom processing. Before the era of digital photography, there was nothing as close to instant as the Polaroid. [Max] is attempting to re-capture that feeling with a modified Polaroid which instantly develops its pictures in a remote picture frame.

The build is based on a real, albeit non-functional, Polaroid Land Camera. Instead of restoring it, a Raspberry Pi with a camera module is placed inside the camera body and set up to capture pictures. The camera needs to connect to a Wi-Fi network before it can send its pictures out, though, and it does this automatically when taking a picture of a QR code. When a picture is snapped, it sends it out over the Internet to wherever the picture frame is located, which has another Raspberry Pi inside connected to an e-ink screen. Once a picture is taken on the camera it immediately shows up in the picture frame.

To help preserve the spirit of the original Polaroid, at no point is an image saved permanently. Once it is sent to the frame, it is deleted from the camera, and the next picture taken overwrites the last. And, for those who are only familiar with grayscale e-ink displays as the integral parts of e-readers, there have been limited options for color displays for a while now, as we saw in this similar build which was painstakingly built into a normal-looking picture frame as part of an attempted family prank.

Continue reading “Polaroid Develops Its Pictures Remotely” →