Hi everyone...I'm sorta new.

[vodid]

But I've been lurking for quite some time. I just put up my first photos in the gallery, (from 1986) and thought perhaps I'd offer my experience using the now defunct, Kodak Recording film 2475 (all five photos in my gallery were shot with it). At the time, I was normally shooting Kodak Panatomic X, and tried the very fast 2475 film as an experiment. After developing my first roll (in Diafine, my usual developer) I hated it. Grainy as hell, not much contrast, and the film was on a thin base that was completely unruly...I felt as if I was trying to tame a wild plastic spring, and getting six pieces of film under a piece of glass so I could make a contact sheet was damn near impossible, it would "boing" into a little coil when you tried to load it into the negative carrier of the enlarger, and then trying to get the strips loaded into a sleeve for storage was a whole new battle. The image quality was so rough that even 5 x 7's were unacceptable. I HATED it. But then I started thinking "outside the box" and had a breakthrough. The fine grain Panatomic X was great for making beautiful large prints, but the 2475 recording film could be thought of as the photographic equivalent of a dependable but quick and dirty sketchbook. I loaded it into an easily pocketable Olympus XA with the meter set at the highest setting, 800. The exposure latitude of this film was incredible, so you'd almost always get an image, regardless of the light ratio...forget the Zone system! And once I accepted the reality, that 3 x 5 inch prints would be the only size I'd be printing, I began to like it even better. Still, there was the aggravation of the springiness, which was one annoying trial after another...struggling with cutting, with the contact sheet, with loading it into the negative carrier, and with archiving it into an archival sleeve...it just pissed you off every step of the way. In a flash of inspiration, I had an unholy thought..."What if I don't bother cutting the film into strips at all, and don't bother with a contact sheet?" This allowed me to insert the long roll into the negative carrier, and to just slide it along from one frame to the next. Printing now marched along quickly and easily, but after I was done, I was again faced with the daunting task of cutting and sleeving the unruly film. Then I had the ULTIMATE UNHOLY thought..."What if I just THROW AWAY THE FILM!" And that's what I did. And that's how I came to like this film. Hope you enjoy the photos...

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/showgallery.php?cat=6123

 

[pvdhaar]

Hi there and welcome!

Just enjoyed looking at the pictures, and they make an uncanny resemblance to Polapan.. And from what you describe not only in looks, but also in the way that you don't have negs in the end..

I personally have never really felt comfortable with the sketch book approach.. Whenever I got a picture this way that merits going back to retake the shot in medium format, the shot wasn't there anymore..