First Time Out With the K3

[chrisgavin]

Just before Christmas I took the Krasnogorsk K3 camera I bought in the Summer on a family trip to Cornwall. I shot one 100 foot roll of Kodak BW Neg 2210 'Surveillance' Film of the family messing about on the dunes at Constantine Bay.
The film stock is quite old and I was 'estimating' exposures, so this was a bit of a test really, I had no idea how this would come out.

I really enjoyed using this camera, it is big and heavy but I used it with a Manfrotto monopod which worked out pretty well. I'm happy that the film seemed to load and transport properly after my less than happy 16mm tests with the Kiev Alpha camera earlier this year.

I developed the first half of this roll in my DIY Spiral Developing Tank.
http://www.chrisgavin.com/2013/07/diy-s ... -cine.html

I've got a huge changing bag now and found loading the spiral much easier this way. I loaded half of the film onto the spiral and split it so as to process the second half later.
My spiral tank takes the 16mm film OK, although the current version only takes just over 50 feet, not the full 100 foot roll I shot.

I DIY processed the film last night using Caffenol C-M developer, water stop and Hypofix.

I'm really happy to see images on the film and I've just shot a few macro stills on a lightbox from the film strip. I'm glad to see that with a bit of 'Levels' tweaking I've got usable exposures on the film : )

I hope to process the other half of this roll soon, but I haven't got any 16mm projector or digitizing method in place ... yet...

For anyone interested in this venture, the still images can be seen over on my blog here...
http://www.chrisgavin.com/2014/12/first ... -16mm.html

Happy New Year to everybody here. Best Wishes for 2015.

Chris

[grainy]

Nice results, Chris! Love the caffinol results
I'm so glad to see some K3 posting that's not "my k3 doesn't work..."
I got myself a k3 many many years ago, shot one nice roll with it and liked how it felt, but the second roll lost its loop and rather than troubleshoot I just shelved it in favor of my Bolex. Now I'm thinking a bit of TLC might easily bring it back to life... just have to find the time, and the extra $ to experiment a bit.
regards
G

[milesandjules]

love the still pix can't wait to see it moving

[pip]

Great images! Presumably you develop with caffenol to a negative image. How do you then convert that to a positive?

[chrisgavin]

Thanks for the comments folks, much appreciate the encouragement.

Pip I should maybe have explained a bit more about the stills I posted...
I put the developed 16mm negative film on my lightbox, then used my canon DSLR with an old manual (Pentax fit) 50mm SLR lens with some macro extension tubes to 'rephotograph' the film frames. I took the image files into Photoshop, applied 'invert' then tweaked the levels a bit to get better exposures.
So to answer your question, yes this is negative film, processed as negative but then reversed digitally back to positive.
Hope this helps.

On the lightbox, I spooled through the developed film and only selected a few odd frames to get these stills... now I've just got to figure out how to do this a few thousand times over ; )

Chris