Use of motion stock for still photography.

[Stephen Furley]

This isn’t a new idea; when the first 35 mm still cameras were made there was no film other than motion picture stock available, and you had to load your own. In the early ‘70s there was a place in East London which sold short lengths of Eastmancolor for this purpose. I considered it because it was cheap, but was put off by the difficulty of processing.

Recently there has been renewed interest in this with several companies supplying both the stock and ECN-2 processing, and there are even small 1 Litre ECN-2 processing kits available for home use. Cinestill sell Vision 3 stocks with the Rem Jet removed which can be processed in C-41, but I’m not interested in that.

At present, and for many months now there have been serious supply problems with Kodak still films, the non-professional ones, colorPlus 200 Ultra Max 400 Gold 200 and my usual choice, Pro Image 100 are almost unobtainable. Why on earth is a non-professional film called Pro Image? Kodak say they are stepping up production to meet much increased demand, but there’s still almost nothing available. I’m not keen on the Fuji negative colour films, and they’re also in short supply as well. Harman seem to have no problems supplying any of their nine Ilford and two Kentmere black and white films. One local shop which did manage to get a delivery from Kodak sold out within two days. Another was told they would get a delivery in April, but are still waiting.

i bought a couple of rolls of 5203 (50D) to try, and have used one of them. I did something ing stupid, and shot it in a Russian Zorki 4 rangefinder camera from 1965 which I had never used before. Unknown film in an unknown camera with an unknown exposure meter is not a good idea, and some of the exposures were off, but the results look interesting. Has anybody else tried this?

i have some scans I can post if manybody is interested.

[Leo Enticknap]

Why on earth is a non-professional film called Pro Image?

Because advertising and marketing folks believe that labeling something as "pro" or "professional" implies higher quality or more functionality, and will therefore convince consumers to pay more for it.

I've never tried to use motion picture stock in a still camera. I guess there is no reason why you couldn't for negative stock. It would be impossible to use print stock as reversal, though, other than for animation or some sort of arthouse weirdness: 2383 has no color mask, and a speed of something like EI 1.5 - about the same speed as the collodion plates use by Victorian photographers!

I do know of at least one instance of the reverse being done. For the 1965 movie Alphaville, Raoul Coutard used 100ft rolls of Ilford HP-5 negative stock sold for still photography, spliced together. He wanted the very high contrast look and the ability to shoot in low light that it provided.

[Kenneth Wuepper]

I have used (in the distant past) motion picture color negative stock. It was back coated with an opaque layer that had to be removed in the development process. There was no typical masking layer, the amber appearing color in portrait negative films was missing. It was fun to play with and it had great detail capability. I used it for architectural studies in the city.

KEN

[Stephen Furley]

Leo, You could well be right about the ‘pro’ thing. Pro Image was introduced in 1997 I think, but only in Mexico and parts of Asia. Interestingly, the first language on the carton is Spanish. Only quite recently has Kodak started selling it in Europe. Apart from being cheaper non-professional films have other advantages for me, they don’t require refrigerated storage, even in warm climates, and do not need to be processed as quickly after exposure. When I go out with a camera I typically take about 6-8 shots, so a film often stays in a camera for several weeks.

Ilford used to make motion picture versions of their FP and HP films in 16 mm and I think in 35 mm as well. They ceased production of them a few years ago, I think around the time they went into administration for a while. ‘Momma Don’t Allow’, an extract from which used to be shown at MoMI, was shot on one of their stocks, FP3 I think.

HP5 was introduced around the late ‘70s, so a film from the ‘60s would have used an earlier version, HP4 or HP3. The Current version is actually HP5 Plus, but I don’t know how it was improved.

Using still film in a motion picture camera could pose a couple of problems. The proper stock for them would have BH perforations at short pitch while still film would have KS perforations at who knows what pitch; it wouldn’t matter in a still camera, but the wrong shape in a motion picture camera, or the wrong pitch on a continuous contact printer may give problems with an unsteady image. Many years ago I had pitch problems with some strange 16 mm stock and had to have it step printed.

Do you remember some years ago a man from Australia I think it was wanted to shoot something with a Kinopanorama camera. In Russia negatives use KS perforations, presumably at short pitch, so the registration pins were made for those perforations, and so he had to use Russian stock, which wasn’t as good.

Glad you’re ok, haven’t seen anybody from here for a long time. Not likely to be at Bradford again this, year, maybe next. Probably never going to be on your side of the pond again.

Ken, that’s interesting, most motion picture negative and intermediate stocks do have the orange masking. I wonder what the one was which you were using.

[Leo Enticknap]

Annoying, I can't find any definitive word online as to precisely what variant of Ilford HP was used to shoot Alphaville. This page says "HPS," which I've never heard of. The still gives you a good idea of the look that Coutard was trying to achieve, but couldn't with any motion picture negative stock then on the market. If I remember correctly, the opening titles state the exact stock type. I projected it in arthouses several times in the past. Always thought it had some clever ideas (especially about computer surveillance - makes you wonder what Jean-Luc Godard would think of today's tech behemoths), but was more than a tad pretentious. Karel Reisz (Momma Don't Allow) was basically cut from the same indie film cultural cloth as Godard, so I'm not surprised that he liked his footage fast and grainy, too.

[Charles MacDonald]

Back when most TV shows were being shot on 35mm, TV production produced a LOT of short ends, and some of the smaller movie Labs would pack this is 35mm cassettes, with the note that you could only send it back to them, (because the REM JET Black backing) needed to be removed in a MP process. this occurred over the time span when ECN process was replaced by ECN-2.)

generally, the customer negative were "best Light" printed onto release print film, and often mounted as slides. some of the colour release print material in those days faded badly. The entire enterprise got a bad reputation because of this, and TV shows moved to being done on Video thus reducing the available supply of short ends. Because of the different gamma, the movie stock made for rather flat prints if directly printed on paper made for still film.

Once again this is coming back, although their are few labs willing to handle it at prices similar to regular C-41 film. Since even silver based prints these days tend to be scanned, the contrast issue is hidden.

in short it is posible, but not a cheep way out. the Tungsten films proably still look better if you use an #85 filter in daylight.

[Van Dalton]

Eons ago there was a company here in the States called "Seattle Film Works" (try and guess where they were based...) that operated a film-by-mail service. They sucked customers into using it by respooling Kodak or AGFA ECN-2 negative film in 135 cartridges and sent mass maillers containing 2 or 3 "free" "starter" rolls (which, surprise, cost $2 each!) a couple times or so a year. IIRC they disguised the fact that it was ECN2 by marking it as something proprietary like "Process SFW-XL" or some bullshit like that on the cartridge. Well, later in the 90s they gave up on ECN2 and started using regular C-41, yet still under the "SFW-XL" moniker to make people think it could only be processed by them. Their shenanigans caught up with them, and a class-action false advertising lawsuit resulted, which they settled out-of-court. The remnants of the company were reorganised as an Internet business "Photoworks" but never made enough money to recoup their loss, and were effectively SOL by the end of the 2000s.

My parents used to get Seattle maillers pretty often in the 90s. For a while a little independent 1-hour developing shop in a strip mall a couple miles from where we lived then (now long, long gone) was equipped to handle it. They even had a sign in the window proudly hailing "WE PROCESS SEATTLE FILM WORKS".

[Paul H. Rayton]

There was a lab here in L.A. that did pretty much the same thing as Seattle Film Works. Under the name "RGB Color Lab" on Highland Ave., they sold color negative film for people to use to shoot pix, and then, when the film was returned to them, they'd process the color negative stock, then do a contact print off the neg., and return to you a set of standard 35mm slides (called diapositives, in Europe). You'd have the 35mm original neg. as a source for top-notch still prints as you'd like, and the slides were like a "proof sheet" of your photos. (They would also accept and process Kodacolor and Kodacolor II stocks, i.e the name-brand Kodak negative stock for stills.)

I used them ... a lot, back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Once I fell into the digital camera rabbit hole, I rather precipitously fell out of the habit of shooting such film-based pix (assisted by the theft of most of my Nikon equipment!), and I've lost track of them now. Doing a quick search tonight, I don't find them, and I suspect that they are not in business any more.

Of course, all the positive print slides that I received back, back then, were printed on basic Kodak print stock of the era -- and all of them have turned a nice shade of pink, sometimes really nasty. I've had to throw away hundreds of those slides, although the negatives remain, and contemporary scanning has been able to salvage much of the imagery to digital files. Whew.

[Stephen Furley]

Leo,

how do I quote from a previous post on these new forums?

HPS would make sense. I don’t know much about it, but it was a fast film. It dates back to the days when Ilford boxes were cream and either blue or red. I think it may well have still been available Long after this. There is a website which lists discontinued film types, but I don’t know how accurate it is. There is some HPS listed on EBay at the moment in White boxes with the Ilford ‘star’ logo with a 1969 expiry date.