 Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I got an opportunity too good to pass up. An invitation to visit the film photography equivalent of Wonka's Chocolate Factory, except without the murder. Probably. Harman was gearing up for their release of Phonix, hooked on it 200. A color film, from a company with a long, rich history of producing black and white film. And they wanted to provide some background info on the stock itself, as well as open up the factory for an exclusive look. Who was I sharing this adventure with? Unfortunately, Trev. Who after like three flights was already pissing me off with this sh**. Anyway, I decided to use this trip as a prime opportunity to test out some film stocks that I haven't used before. After all, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. In this case, shoot black and white film. Not get totally plowed on wine and enter into battle with a lion. Eventually, after some turbulence and Trev instinctively grabbing my hand out of fear, we arrived in Manchester and settled into our accommodations, conveniently attached to a pub. Not too bad. In traditional English feudalism, I'd be in a nice, warm room, and Trev would be camping just outside in the cold with a nice view of my warm room. It was a long day, or three days, I don't know, of travel, and our work was just beginning. With the weather taking a slight turn, Trev already wanted in, but instead we elected to go out and shoot. After all, we were in a new land, but first I couldn't find any harsh direct unforgiving sunlight in the UK to load up some film under. So I did the next best thing and found a lamp, which like moth, I was attracted to. In the Mamiya 7, I decided to try out Kentmere 400 that I'd be pushing two stops. After all, black and white is a bit of a cheat code for dreary overcast days, and a lot of people have told me that pushing Kentmere two stops is a good alternative to pushing HP5 two stops. Kentmere 400, in my experience, is quite flat at 400 ISO, so a chemical push really helps give you those cursed and crushed tones. Ready to go, we hit the streets of Nutsford to see what we Americans were missing out on ever since we gained independence. So Kentmere 400 pushed two stops. Let me be frank for a minute. No. Jason. I don't really give a s*** what any datasheet says. This is a 1600 ISO film stock. I mean, what the f***? Honestly, I probably could have shot it at 3,200 and it'd still be daddy. I should compare it to HP5 pushed two stops sometime. Overall, Kentmere seems less grainy. Back in the day when I shot it at 400, the shots were pretty dang flat. But these ones held up pretty well overall. I don't know. Maybe I'm converted. I was rocking a Nikon FM3A, I believe, with a 40 millimeter and odd combo. But then again, he's an odd guy. But he swears by it. He also swears by his method of loading 35 millimeter film so efficiently that he can rock out 38 shots instead of 36. Anyway, if I was going to keep listening to Trev's film photography hacks all evening, I was definitely going to need some coffee. Because back in California, it was like 3.15 a.m. or something like that. And while I'm usually up blasting some Fetty Wap and getting f***ed up with Baxter, this time around, I was definitely feeling the jet lag. While my coffee was literally magma, I decided to kill off the roll in the coffee shop and then crumpet slam or whatever British people do, some Ilford Delta 3,200 and the MAM7. Is there a way to load 120 films until you get 38 shots? Yeah. Delta 3,200 is another one of those film stocks that I haven't really shot too much of in the past. In fact, the only time I can really remember even shooting it was when I pushed it two stops to 12,800 ISO, which is a crazy move that somehow kind of worked. Regardless, I was excited to see what this stock is capable of at box speed. Ah, please, no gang signs. Right outside the coffee shop was this scene. And of course, I had to stand in the middle of a busy street and shoot it. I like how simple it is overall. And with 3,200 in the camera, it's very easy to just close down and get everything in focus. Better watch out, Trev. So the meter on the MAM7 only goes up to 1,600, but with some clever ingenuity and the power of friendship, we figured out you can set the exposure compensation to minus one on top of 1,600 ISO, which would theoretically give you 3,200. Yeah, you're a genius. Walking the suburban streets of Nutsford, we came across several gems as people were getting off work and heading home. Like this one. There were people right here. After the Delta 3,200 was spent, I was inspired by the Boston Tea Party and straight up dumped Hella Camp Mir 400 back into the MAM7 with a two-stop push, of course. All's well that ends at a pub and it was miller time or whatever the British equivalent of that is. I slept for probably about 16 hours during the factory today. I am going to bring the MAM7 and shoot a bit with it, regardless. Got some interviews to do. Let's get to it. Let's get coffee first. That was it for the ill-fated Camp Mir 400 as I decided to go back to an old flame, Delta 3,200. Today was the first day of touring the factory at Harmon and I didn't know what to expect. Low light capability seemed like a valuable asset going forward. You know what the only thing that sucks about the MAM7? What? And there's a few things. It'll let you shoot on frame 11, which makes you think you're on frame 10. Mine doesn't let me do that. Really? I've never noticed that. I have the same one as you. But mine's a 2014. Anyway, after seeing the queen box of Phoenix that all rolls of 35 are milked from, it's time to see how the sausage was made after travel's done embarrassing us. OK, so how is film made? Good question. Profound question. Probably one of the more profound questions ever since we found that monolith out in the desert that everyone forgot about and everything somehow has gotten worse since then. Anyway, I'll do my best to explain. So on day one, we actually got to tour finishing, which you probably couldn't guess was the final part of the process. In order for everything to kind of make sense, let's actually start at the beginning. In the early days, there was the Big Bang followed by thousands of years of bulls*** until chemistry was discovered, which isn't really that important unless you're into film photography. OK, so picture it like pancakes. No, pancake. Where the pancake itself is the non-photosensitive film base. This is all quite an over simplification, but just go with it. Nobody wants to just raw dog a dry ass pancake, so you need to add syrup to it or whatever you want, really **** it. Your arteries are gonna be clogged anyway. Might as well just lay it on. Think of the liquid emulsion like syrup. That's the light sensitive part that makes it good. And just like syrup drizzled slowly and erotically onto the pancake, photosensitive liquid emulsion gets drizzled onto a non-photosensitive base and boom, you have film. Liquid emulsion gelton base. Seems pretty easy, right? Well, it's not. A new film stock basically begins at research and development. Photosensitive emulsions are these not very tasty liquids stored in these ice cream containers. That's what liquid emulsion looks like. Looks like yogurt. Yeah. They're basically just different formulations of photosensitive chemicals and dyes to my understanding. It's not like it's something easy, like monster energy drink mixed with absinthe or something cool like that. Before we open anything, we'll go into the light that we're coating in. So with paper, we obviously coat in brown light. With film, we go into pan light. Obviously, when you're working in the dark, you've got to wait sort of five, 10 minutes before you just do any of this because your eyes need to adjust in. So today, what we're doing is we're doing a three layer coating. It's Ketmir 400, which has two emulsion layers, an undercoat and a top coat. So both the undercoat and top coat are both emulsion layers and they're the light sensitive parts. As you can see, there's some emulsion layers, like a lot pinker than the other one. As you can tell by the state of my love coat, it gets quite messy down here. Yeah, it looks like you buried a body, man. You got blood on. Well, you know what? This happened as well. We were down here. I was coating down here with Tony and I had a red pen in his pocket. We went down into the light, came up and I was just covered in red ink. I had all of my gloves on my hands, all over my sleeve. You just have like chemical fights in here, you know? So basically the room we're in here, it features a small scale coating machine and dryer for R&D to just test things out. The coating machine puts the syrup on the pancake, the emulsion on the base. There's a full scale coating machine on site to create something called a master roll, but we'll get into that later. So after we do the dispensing, we do what's called degassing and that is pretty much what it says on the tin. Basically put it under a vacuum and draw all the air bubbles that are in it. Soft air entrainments. So when we coat on there, we have that like air free solution to get that nice smooth glossy coating. After the emulsions are degassed, they are transferred to the temperature jackets. They keep the different emulsions in a liquid form and eventually feed into the coating head, but these need to be hand connected in the dark. Luckily for them, I was born in the darkness, molded by it. So I decided to give it a go. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm gonna do it. I'll tell you now, what you have to do is you have to pull this connection bit forwards and pull this out. That smashed it first time. Come on, well, Trev, do you want to have a go? You wanna do it? Do you want any more gloves? There you go. Push it in. And yeah, that's all there is to connecting really. You know, all connected. But this one's connected the most, right? Yeah, that's the best connection, yeah. So here's the mini coating head where the liquid emulsion layers get essentially painted onto the gelatin base. After that, the track there then sends the now coated film straight into the next room over, which has a mini scale version of a drying rack to solidify and set all the liquid emulsion on top of that base. Right, so the film comes through and that little letterbox there comes into the second bed. So yeah, they obviously charge the base so it sticks properly and goes onto it. So there's no bubbles, there's no spots, there's no places where there's more emulsion than another. It's a very smooth, classy even coating, which is pretty much exactly what we want. It's about two meters per trial. And then we coat everything twice. So if we're making variation, everything will be done in duplicate. Anyway, after the alarm went off because Trev just couldn't resist tasting the glossy dried film, we were kicked out and just decided to shoot some film of this little reception area on site. This lobby was quite a scene. It seemed little much had changed since the heyday of film and film manufacturing and the photography reflected that in a good way. Ilford Delta 3200 is just so flexible in most conditions. I like this shot the best. Something about the tones on the chrome chairs and the background garden setting turned out really nice. I love me some crunchy ass grain too. So after R&D irons out a new formulation or an update to an existing formulation, it then needs to be made exactly how R&D made it but on a massive scale. That's done on the actual production line where there's a coating head that makes something called a master roll. A master roll is like a huge uncut roll of film stock that the finishing department cuts down to formats like 120, four by five, and even 16 by 20. If you want it badly enough, you little freak. A master roll itself can make more than 33,000 rolls of 35 millimeter film. So it's quite a long and wide sheet. It literally requires a machine the size of a three-story apartment block to manufacture it. The coating machine, otherwise known on site as M14. Right, so for starters, the liquid emulsion is mixed in large batches to be layered onto the gelatin base of the master roll. Don't forget my perfect and utterly flawless pancake metaphor. So how do we make emulsion? What does it look like? Yeah. So that's just in its raw. I'm just kidding. So that's in its raw state. It's like cheese. I wouldn't eat it. Eventually, if you leave that out, it'll harden and it will become a different color. So yeah. Okay. Anyway, after Trev set off the alarm again for trying to taste the emulsion, we learned about how it is originally chemically concocted. The emulsions are made out of microscopic crystals that I guess are grown and then filtered the crap out of through a process called washing. We kind of skipped over this process back in R&D, but it is essentially the process that makes the forbidden gray yogurt. So we have two ways that we grow the crystals. So we have a traditional crystal growth where the silver nitrate and the halides are jetted in a very precise amount of time, which I think is about 120 seconds. The other side that we have, which is the rapid mix, which is the paper, more papers are made with rapid mix. At this point, the crystals are only sensitive to blue light. So we need to make them more sensitive. Then what we need to do is put it into what we call digestion. So it takes it from just being sensitive to blue, takes it right the way through, through the green and into the red. Once we've gone through that, we then come to the bagging process, drop it out into five kilogram bags, then we take it into our what we call a cold store. And in that cold store is where we set it. So we set it and it becomes solid like the piece that you touched before. Okay. So the emulsion, once it's been made, I said it goes into a black plastic bag. So what happens is that bag gets caught, what we call shredded, and then it gets tipped into a vessel where it's warmed up and it's melted again to make it fluid. This looks like a Costco. Okay, so these are the vessels where we mix. As you can see, they're very clean on the inside. These hold about 400 kilos. So from in here, it gets pumped off through a series of filters and goes up to the coating head. So that would be where the emulsion meets the base, just like back in R&D, just on a bigger scale. But speaking of base things, what about the actual base itself? Well, these are the raw base rolls. So these ones that you can see on your side here, these are all the film base rolls. We keep them wrapped until we're ready to use them because obviously it takes the moisture out of them if we leave them out. A giant 35 millimeter spool. Yeah. But it goes into the machine in the coffin like that and the machine actually takes the lid off, gets the roll out, puts it in position, then puts it back into the coffin again after. Come on, let's go have a look at the machine. Falling one at a time. Okay, so prepare yourself for the coating machine. No, the coating beast where the liquid debubbled syrup, I mean emulsion, meets the base or the pancake and makes a master roll of film. For starters, the whole thing is f***ing massive, like my ego. Here's the entire building and that's the whole machine from the outside. Huge span, it takes up like three stories. And even Janet was out of air from how breathtaking the coating machine is. I'm all out of breath now. Okay. The coating machine and area around it is constantly being cleaned after every run to avoid any specs or defects on the master roll because it's quite an expensive thing to make. Again, 33,000 plus rolls of 35 millimeter film. This is where the base is loaded onto the system and conjoins with a leader to direct it towards the coating head. Normally all this is in the dark. So this top one's fell back, as you can see, and it'll now run from the bottom one. This scrap one will come off, go out and a new roll will come in and be put in its place. Once the base is loaded in, it's time to cook. I mean coat. This machine can coat it 100 meters a minute. We don't coat film at that, by the way, but coat some paper products at that for no film products, get Coasey's out of that. So here's one of their coating heads. It kind of looks like a printer. And I guess in a way it is, it prints the wet stuff, emulsion or syrup onto the base. So can you see that's the actual base there? This is the hole of this, slides in and out of these slots here would fall the emulsion. Through that, what we call the letterbox there into there, that's the setting bed. So it pulls the base down, it's coals and it sets the emulsion. Once it goes through there, it's off into the dryers. So to be fair, most of this massive three-story building is actually dryers. There's actually a lot of them and spans quite a bit of real estate. About 500 meters to be exact, but we Americans don't have to use meters as a form of measurement, ever since that whole taxation without representation thing a couple of years ago. So for your information, it's about five and a half football fields. Yeah, so it starts up there, dryer box one goes all the way down, dryer box 19. Like I said, if you dry too fast, it'll crack. If you don't dry well enough, it'll still be wet and then it'll all fit together at the other end. So this is coming out of the dryers now here, which is the start of the conditioning. So at this point it's dry now, but what we need to do is put it back to more or less the same temperature as it was before we did anything to it. And after all that is done, the master roles then rolled up and sealed into a light tight coffin, which I think would be super cool to be buried in one day if there's even a body to be buried, but that's besides the point. The coffin is then stored in a warehouse or transferred to finishing. I believe also at this point they take samples off the master role at random for the quality control team to take a look at and make sure there are no defects like dust particles, uneven emulsion spread, light leaks, fog, whatever. But all this talk of emulsion and dryers was making us photography horny. So it was time to call it a day and head back to town to wander around aimlessly like usual and I don't know, maybe shoot some stuff. At the end of Nutsford there's this huge park that used to be a palace or something. Nowadays it's pretty much just home to a crap load of sheep and deer, but the three of us decided to take a nice romantic stroll there that evening. After all I still had some 3200 in the Mamiya 7 I needed to bang out and I was starting to have a deeper appreciation for film and how it's put together. When the Delta 3200 was finished I decided to try a new Ilford stock. Well, not new, just new to me I guess. I've never shot it before Delta 400. There's a bit of a cult following for this film. All I've ever heard about it is that it gets compared to T-Max 400 quite a bit and rightfully so. It's super sharp and the grain is almost non-existent. Anyway, with the sheep staring us down at every junction and shit literally everywhere we decided to turn back as we were on their turf and should something go wrong we wouldn't have the home field advantage. I will say I was knocking out photos here left and right on the Delta but a lot of them weren't solid enough to show. So when the Delta 400 was capped out I threw in some more 3200 and I'm glad I did because the light was starting to dim a little bit. That and with extremely high ISO you can easily close down and rock out a shot like this where you get that deep focus because of the distance between the foreground and the background. I love this shot. That sound is me slipping it into the portfolio. Anyway, it was time for dinner which in the UK is just Guinness. Either way, we were doing just fine. All right, successful first day. Everyone at the factory was super, super generous with their time. We did also see how they were cutting up and packaging the paper. We basically went down this like dark tunnel that was like progressively getting darker and darker and it really just felt like we're going into the bottom of like a mine shaft or something. Okay, so we're going into paper finishing now so just be careful it's in complete darkness so watch your head. Yeah, got it. Tomorrow, I don't know. I'm either gonna shoot Phoenix or FP4. I've never shot FP4 in 120. Probably do Phoenix tomorrow. Yeah. This camera and not embarrass myself. Too handy. Unfortunately today it is raining and what do we shoot when it's raining? That's right. We shoot black and white. Anyway, after getting in a car that we thought for sure would crash because the driver was driving on the wrong side of the road we made it back to the Harman factory. So where did we leave off? Okay, so we've coated a master roll and laid it to rest in a coffin. So now what? The master roll certainly won't fit into my 35 millimeter camera. I don't know unless I really jam it in there I guess but maybe it would just make more sense to cut it down to size instead. Enter finishing. First things first you need to exhume the grave where you bury your master roll coffin and then grave rob it. Then bring your findings to the slicer or whatever they call it on site. In a completely dark and clean room a machine chops the master roll down to whatever size finishing is producing that day like 35 millimeter for example. So we normally don't take people into this so just be careful, please don't touch anything when you're in there. Okay, yeah, no problem, got it. Oh my God, is there a f***ing cat in here? 120 gets cut down and rolled into these huge light type magazines that look almost a little like motion picture film magazines. 35 millimeter obviously just goes into those little cassettes that you load into your 35 millimeter camera with pure giddy that only ever fades when you get your scans back. Those canisters or cassettes start off as a flat metal and then they use a machine probably called the crusher or something pretty gangsta like that to bend them into canister shapes and then they also slam in a 35 millimeter spool. Then the empty canisters come on out hungry than ever and ready for some 35 millimeter film to be put in them. And this is what we call a pancake. When these have been prepared the pancakes have put in these boxes here, black boxes and that's how they're transported from upstairs to downstairs ready to go into the dark room. So what do we do first? So they're just empty canisters or cassettes and this machine here literally puts the cassettes the right way around on the line. So when the film is pan-kicked up it doesn't actually have sprocket holes yet. Back in the day it was just a guy in a dark room using a paper hole puncher that they picked up from their local office supply store and he'd just spend all day manually punching sprocket holes into the films. But turns out that takes quite a while so they started using this machine instead that runs the film through in an alarming speed and stamps sprocket holes into it. Of course this is also done in the dark. So there's your cassettes coming down there you'll see them going in here and the machine picks up this spool here and actually positions the cassette in exactly the right position. Where the information that we talked about the sign in, the frame numbers, the grade that all happens in here. Takes that hook into the mouthpiece it automatically clicks onto the spool it spools up and you end up with the tail at the other side. So the film, the finished film is now being fed in at the back here. The film is put into there into one of those houses drops into a tub and it transfers over and gets a lid put on it. The machine picks one cardinal and opens it pops the film in at the back, folds the flaps over and then the machine literally as you can see the head it picks five up, goes along, takes it into the box, picks the next five up. And then bam, the rolls of film are in the mail on their way to my Leica M6 which was starving for attention. Really like these shots. However, 200 ISO is not very high for interior low light like this and that conical lens isn't gonna be winning any races and speed anytime soon. So I was working at like one eighth of a second and several shots were still underexposed. But the ones that turned out turned out fantastic like this one and this one of an ominous black monolithic pop-up darkroom. Okay, medium format. So here's the 120 machine and a brief tutorial on how to use it by a guy who never read the manual. Basically you attach your 120 magazine, your roll of backing paper, a roll of tape, give the machine a kiss and it makes rolls of 120 medium format film for you. And if you thought a Leica M6 sounds mechanically satisfying when you use it you clearly haven't heard this beast running before. Spools get collected in another room and then shot across on over to the 120 machines via tube system and in a light tight container the 120 film gets taped to backing paper, cut, jammed, rolled and printed with key code information onto the spool and closed up with the classic unexplosed sticker. Every now and then the operator needs to reload the film or the backing paper, the stickers, et cetera. And in that case some rolls in between get discarded to maintain quality control. Okay, now that the 120 rolls are spun the bin of freshly produced 120 gets dumped into this machine which essentially wraps it in that space age chrome wrapper that 120 Ilford film comes in. It's kind of like sausage links, except enough of these probably won't give you a heart attack. The boxing machine basically then just uses ultra futuristic proprietary technology and tennis balls, lots of those to put the finishing touches on the product. After that it's time to get bricked up, baby. The over wrapping machine which literally just pops 10 films together and wraps them in a nice little box which we call a brick. When that's all done it's off to the warehouse to be sent out to wherever they're gonna go and yeah, there's a ton of quality control checks in between everything. Like literally at every stage of the process they're checking that. Pretty sure I accidentally got quality control checked at some point too and definitely did not pass. Speaking of 120 and packing it up there was still some Delta 3200 in my Mamiya 7 and what better time to shoot it than after a breakdown of both how to package 120 and my overall emotional state. There was this cool empty cafeteria rec room space that we were able to shoot for a minute. This is probably the best shot from the set. 3200 actually holds onto information quite well overall as the highlights aren't too blasted to hell even though I exposed for the interior. Regardless, after all that we were dropped off back in town and had the whole evening ahead of us. So we got our asses back down to Tatton Park home of those sketchy looking sheep. Regardless, this time I kept my M6 close by. On the way there I shot this. It's fine, it's not a masterpiece by any stretch but I like the lighting and the colors quite a bit. Sure, you can have all the cool ass lighting and tones that you want, but what's the point if you don't have mood? I don't know either. Anyway, it was mating season, probably, I don't know. This guy was hollering quite a bit. Sounds like a dinosaur. And I took a few photos on the walk out amongst the deer and sheep but nothing I'm too proud of. Requests is if I get attacked you have to get it on tape. I would exploit it for money. I was about it for the park. After that it was time to hit up a Daven Busters but we couldn't find any Daven Busters in Nutsford for some stupid reason so we headed to dinner and called it a day. Last day here in town I'm gonna head to the factory after get some coffee. I think I have like two or more shots, Delta 3200 in the Mamiya 7 as well. So that'll be today's journey. Let's get this bread. Let's eat this wheat. Back at the factory for some pickup shots and pickup b-ball to teach everyone over in the UK how to dunk American Revolution style. We got to see the warehouse and I gotta brief glimpse into my future, probably. I should rather not see it. This is the dream but like, how do you even like, how big is the camera that takes this? You know what I mean? It was also high time I wrapped up the Phoenix in my Leica M6 whilst touring the factory grounds. These interiors on Phoenix were quite surprising. The light inside wasn't green at all. It was standard warehouse factory tungsten or something like that but all these Phoenix shots flipped green somehow. I'm chalking it up to Naked Lab Pro and the conversion process trying to correct itself but then being fooled by the overabundance of some other color. But speaking of fools, you'd be one if you don't already have a website or websites through today's sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that features the ability to craft your own corner of the internet from the ground up. 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And if you use the code grainydays at checkout you can get 10% off your first purchase. It was last day, finished all my roles. Tomorrow I'm heading to the airport. It's been a really fun trip. It had a little bit of everything and it was fantastic. That's about it. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity that I just couldn't say no to. Seeing the factory and grounds where some of my favorite film stocks were made puts things into a whole new perspective. I definitely need to thank Matt, Hillary, Michelle, Hannah, Giles and everyone at the factory who welcomed us in and showed us around. Especially at such a busy time in their schedule. After all, Phoenix is here. The first step for Harmon into a much larger expansive territory. But really the big question is, do any of these shots hopper? Edward hopper? I think so, yeah. I really like this shot from the library and this one somewhere in the halls of Harmon. This one is great to maybe a tad bit underexposed but sometimes that's the vibe, you know? Black and white didn't disappoint either as it rarely ever does. This shot is the definition of portfolio and this one might be up there too but it's a similar concept so I don't know if I want any overlap like that. This one of the reception area was also quite a surprise to me. Turns out after reviewing the work from this video all the shots that I liked on black and white were Delta 3200. So maybe I've started to develop a taste for it overall. Also, I think I like shooting it. Would I do anything differently? Probably not, no. Did I totally butcher the explanation on how to manufacture film? Probably yes, yeah. Did I catch the bug for ultra large format 20 by 24? Probably maybe. Might've.