Hi I'm Rachel from Little Vintage Photography.
I use non-digital cameras which are these kind of old vintage ones that
take rolls of film or cartridges of film a little bit like this.
And the idea is that once you've actually shot the roll of film,
you process it in special chemistry and that reveals the final negative
that you can then work from.
It's quite a magical experience.
This is what a negative looks like or it's a roll of film
as negative strips, these ones are from the medium format cameras so and they're
sort of like a square shape or a rectangular shape,
like this but quite a bit bigger.
And these ones here are the 35 millimetre ones,
so they have something called sprocket holes at the top and bottom
and if you look at the cartridge of film
you'll see that there is also sprocket holes on that too.
That helps it to go through the camera and to make sure that it's actually winding on
from frame to frame so these are individual frames here.
So this is a strip of negatives from the whole roll
of a 35 millimetre film and this is a whole roll of medium format film.
When you have a final strip of negatives like something like this.
What you can do is actually take the negatives
and put them into something called an enlarger.
That's in a place called a dark room, it's literally a dark room
where you block out the rest of the light and you might have seen it on TV
programs and things where you switch on the red light.
What you would do is to put one of your negatives into an enlarger.
You'd shine light through the negative onto photographic paper,
the photographic paper has a coating on it which is a chemical
that has a reaction with that light
and then you put it through some more chemistry to develop stop and fix it
and you're left with a final print at the end.
Once you have your set of negatives the other thing you might
want to do is create a contact sheet.
As a film photographer myself these are something that I use all the time.
I'll show you what I mean here.
Now I've got a contact sheet of 35 millimetre negatives
and a contact sheet of the medium format negatives.
There we go.
And what you would do is you basically lay your negatives onto photographic paper,
you shine light from an enlarger onto it and then you process these in developer
stop and fix and you're left with the final positive impression of your negative strips.
They're a really useful tool because it means
that you can actually decide and look at the images
before you choose to print them up
in the same way as we might do with digital files rather than actually editing
every single frame or every single image,
using a contact sheet gives you the opportunity
to actually choose which ones are your favourites
and which ones you would actually like to print up,
rather than having to edit or print all of them.
I'm going to show you another helpful tool that I have now.
So here's my light pad, I'm just going to plug in my battery pack
which will light it up really bright.
There we go.
And then if I bring in my negatives and lay them on top,
you'll see that we actually get to chance to have a look at them
and decide which ones we like.
So this is another way of referencing the print
before you print everything up as a full image
and it gives you a chance to sort of see what your negatives look like.
And I'm just going to show you what it looks like with the medium format as well.
So these are our medium format negatives and again you can see that they're a larger
negative space and that there's fewer of them
but again it gives you a chance to see the whole roll in one go,
rather than individually having to print up every single frame.
If you've got any questions about analog photography processes,
alternative techniques, if you want to try out a few more things
or have any questions drop me a line,
I am on littlevintagephotography.co.uk
and I look forward to hearing from you soon.