E25 Homemade Film

Nick and Graham talk about the basics of making your own film, or other types of alternative photographic media. This can be done by coating a variety of surfaces, such as glass, paper, acetate, or regular film stock with ready-made emulsions, or with home-brew alternative light-sensitive solutions.

They talk a bit in a vague way about ways to make specialized film holders for plates. Making your own media means just about any format is possible, opening up the possibility of building cameras for novel, never-before-seen aspect ratios.

Speaking of alternative formats, they also discuss Ilford’s Ultra Large-Format special-order period, which is on now and runs through May 27, allowing people to put in requests for a large number of different odd and large format film sizes, available in 2 or 3 Ilford emulsions.

Graham recommends a movie on Netflix about Elsa Dorfman, who ran one of the giant polaroids for many years. http://bsidefilm.com/

Nick recommends looking at some of the many books on Alternative Processes that have been listed on past episodes, and points to the use of traditional photo re-touching oil glazes as a way to fine-tune colors on color prints, as well as to hand-color black and white photos.

The boys also mention J Lane and his dry plate side hustle that he sells through Pictographica (https://www.pictoriographica.com/about.html)