The Kodak H35N and rambling about half frame experiments
Kodak H35N + Kentmere 400 in Rodinal Stand Dev
I recently developed my first roll out of the Kodak H35N that I wrote about in my last blog post. How did it go? How was my shooting experience? How was the first roll? How was the processing workflow? To all of the above I’d have to answer a mix of joy and horror, in all honesty. But there’s already another roll in the little Kodak so take that how you will.
I did love the shooting experience. It was quite literally exactly what I was looking for when I talked about wanting a camera that I could take with me anywhere and which would allow me to loosen up and shoot more freely and intuitively, taking the whole process of image making less seriously. The camera is so small and so dead simple that it’s easy to just have on me at all times, and when something does strike me all I do is wind the film advance, point the camera and click the shutter. It’s a fixed shutter speed and aperture so there’s nothing to think about even if I wanted to. And being half frame I have twice the frames on a roll of film, 72 to be exact. So there is a liberating aspect there as well. All in all, the shooting experience was amazing and this is probably why the camera is already loaded with another roll of film that’s almost another 20 frames deep so far. The whole thing adds up, again, to a tool that encouraged exactly the off the cuff, unserious, experimental approach I was looking for.
As far as the first roll goes, I was actually pretty impressed with how the images came out. I know one of the distinguishing features of the H35N is its glass lens, or at least a lens with a glass front element. But the picture quality was shockingly competent. Resolution is about what I expected. As a half frame camera we’re shoving a full image in to a space which is technically even smaller than half a 35mm frame. Add to this a 400 speed film and stand dev’ing in Rodinal and you get a relatively crunchy, low-res rendering. But for reasonable viewing sizes the resolution and rendering is pretty passable. I could definitely see printing these at a small size in a small book or something like that.
On a more thematic note I was pleased to find that the laid back approach to image-making I talked about above had resulted in me taking some more experimental liberties in how I photographed things. Things that I wouldn’t have normally photographed, or experimenting with different ways of photographing familiar subject matter were pleasant surprises when I was scanning in the photos. This was one of the things I was most looking forward to learning from this setup, so it was really cool to see it brought to fruition in the end results and I’m hoping that continuing to work with this setup continues to help shake me out of old habits, tired ways of seeing and making photos, etc..
Okay so the little half frame is amazing. The shooting experience is rad, the end results are pretty sweet, it’s teaching me stuff about how to approach image-making in a different way. It’s all paradisiacal, right? Kind of. I’m obviously stoked enough on the whole little setup to have already gotten started on another roll. But there is a dark side. The scanning and processing. Oh my god.
I’m not sure how many of you scan your own film but when you scan half frame, as far as I’m aware, you pretty much have to scan the space of a whole 35mm frame so each individual scan contains two images. This creates hurdles for trying to balance scanning settings between both images. Sometimes this isn’t a big deal but it can be really annoying if you have very different exposures between frames. Then when you bring these photos in to your editing software you have to essentially duplicate every image and then crop each copy in to its respective image. The result, to say the least, is tedious. It was an hours long process to get from a developed roll of film to scanned and finalized individual half frame photos.
I do think I can work around some of this annoyance in Silverfast (my preferred scanning software) by restricting the working frame to a single side of the 35mm negative, effectively scanning the negative twice but getting individual half frame photos in each scan. The process would take twice as long to scan but I would be able to optimize scanning settings for each individual image and wouldn’t have to deal with the duplicating and cropping nonsense later in post. I think this will end up being the least annoying process for digitizing and working with the half frame format. It will still be annoying, to be sure. But slightly less so. Time will tell when I have to develop the next roll.
All in all, I’m pretty stoked about this whole venture so far and I’m looking forward to running some more rolls through this little guy. Below is a little handful of other images off the first roll of the little H35N
