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Agitation is often treated as a complicated and mysterious function that a photographer can only master after countless hours of trial and error. Frankly, agitating the SP-8x10 is so simple that it confuses people. Follow these three guidelines and you should get perfect negatives every time: First, be sure to presoak. This has nothing to do with preparing the emulsion for processing and everything to keeping the film flat. "Taco" the film (curl it emulsion side in like a taco) for ten seconds before placing it in the tray. This lets the water get under it faster. Once loaded and...

After introducing our Rev 2 film holders, we started getting occasional reports of "blotches" on the film that matched up with the vertical bars of the film holder. (About 3% of users reported it.)  Here's a sample (we played with the tint in photoshop to make it more visible): Some users also reported that the film was "stuck" to the holder and had to be pried off. Over time, we discovered that there were, in fact, two radically different defects being reported: 1. If the blotches are black or dark gray, then most likely the negative was loaded in backwards...

We're pretty sure that everyone reading this knows about gray cards and how to use them; so we'll skip the introduction. (If not, there are thousands of YouTube videos available, some even get it right.) So when we designed the Photographer's Logbook (available here), it only made sense to make the cover a standard 18% gray card. Turns out that's easier said than done, most print shops have no idea what "18% gray" means or how to reproduce it. Actually, the first problem was determining true 18% gray. We've got a bunch of gray cards from different manufacturers and none...

"Every film developer manufactured in the last 80 years has been optimized for 35 mm film."  Okay, there are a few exceptions but for the most part, it's true. We won't spend any time defending our thesis; frankly, it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that we decided that the world needed a new film developer optimized for large format film.We started with three objectives:First, it needed to be optimized for large format negatives. Yeah, that's whole point but what does that mean? Mainly, we don't need super fine grain (a major issue with 35 mm); instead, we want...

We didn't realize how strongly people felt about Big Macs! Here's a few additional comments, especially for those that didn't read the disclaimers at the end of the last blog post. Of course we are familiar with the standard inflation calculators and other such financial tools etc. Frankly, they're rather meaningless for this conversation. Why? Because they are trying to capture the overall value of money and thus include too many variables: electronics, fuel, housing etc. For example, what if we compare the price of film to color televisions? How about to the price of gasoline? Both give interesting answers...