Chaitanya Guttikar

I am not much into macro photography, (unless we are talking about scanning tunneling microscope photography) but I am always interested in people experimenting with Do It Yourself photography equipment and techniques. One such well known technique, when you don’t want to invest in an expensive Macro Lens, is to just take any (preferably normal or wider) prime lens and turn it around – i.e. mount it on your camera with the front element towards the film/sensor and the back element facing the subject.

This gives you the desired magnification required for photographing tiny objects – voila! Macro Photography. The main tricky part for this macro setup is (more…)

Do you want to know if it’s a good idea to do Stand development in D76? And what dilution to use for that? Then here is the short answer.  In one line : DON’T DO IT! Based on my personal experience, various experiments and logic based on photochemistry-

I used 1:4 D76 in my 1500 ml tank that takes 6 negatives of 4×5 size as a first try. The commonly followed stand development procedure is 1 minute initial agitation followed by 1 hour (or time of your choice) stand with no agitation (True Stand development). I knew, even before I started, that being a solvent developer, D76 is not a good candidate for stand development. Actually, there are two reasons why it’s not a good choice but we will get to that. (more…)