 Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Whopper whopper whopper double junior triple. Oh, hey, we ever had trouble inventing something and then making about a billion dollars off of that invention? Yeah, me too. But today everything changes. Well, not really. I'm still broke. Not like financially, just like my spirit. Today we're venturing over to arts and crafts YouTube to build a special camera rig that can do what Kodak doesn't have the balls to do. That's right. We're going to try recreating air chrome with an asterisk. Obviously, it's not real air chrome. What is Kodak air chrome for the 100th and hopefully final time it is a discontinued color film stock that was sensitive to infrared light and created these really wacky images that you are probably familiar with. It's really expensive stuff nowadays and super rare. So I've been spending the past couple of months years actually trying to find a way to remake it convincingly. I've always wanted an all film solution to rebuilding the chrome but it's not exactly an easy task. A lot of people do a process called trichroming where they take the same photo three times with different color filters and once with a visible light blocker and combine them in post to make something kind of air chrome adjacent. There are a plethora of issues with trichroming. The biggest one being you'll always need to use a tripod and because it takes time to change filters and set exposure, things in your scene will have moved and you'll get this really colorful prismatic effect that is super groovy but yeah it's kind of a dead giveaway that you're not shooting air chrome. But what if there's a way to get the same image in the same moment on two separate film stocks and even more you wouldn't need a tripod. Sounds pretty crazy right? Well here's the concept. Two recorders pointed at a beam splitter held in place by a portable handheld rig. Sounds simple enough right? But what the f*** is a beam splitter? So a beam splitter is a special piece of glass that allows a certain percentage of light to travel through it and then the remaining percentage of that light to bounce off of it or reflect. It basically partitions your light into two or more separate beams that produce the same image. That's where recorder number one and recorder number two come in. And by recorder I mean 35 millimeter film cameras because why not make this as inconvenient as possible? But what can we do with this new found power? Well like my uncle once said before he was brutally murdered in a robbery gone wrong with great power comes great responsibility. What does this mean to us if we could hypothetically capture the same image twice? Well what if we could capture the same image on infrared black and white film and visible light color film separately? Then what if in post we splice the infrared image into the visible light color image? We would theoretically have something that is very very similar to the film photography Holy Grail Aerochrome. Okay well great that sounds good to me. How do we make these dreams come true and even build this rig? I don't know I'm not an engineer so I'm just gonna figure it out step by step. Oh maybe I am an engineer. First in foreskin or whatever the phrase is I'll need beam splitter glass a big piece of it. Luckily teleprompters use this alien technology constantly. So I bought a teleprompter system off of jungle.com one that was made of metal and looked sturdy. As an added bonus with this system we get a free tripod mounting socket for recorder number one. Step number two would be to find a way to mount recorder number two at a 90 degree angle underneath the system. And step three profit I guess. Here's our double shutter release cable. There you go. So like when I go to take a photo it'll have to be like a okay now I just need another Nikon camera. I can just borrow one from Caleb. I have another one of these lenses on the way so the lenses will line up. I just need to find a way to mount this now underneath the the beam splitter because there is not enough clearance. Yeah I feel the same way but. So with the build going super well I had high hopes that this dream project would come to fruition shortly. All right what's up welcome back to another build day I guess you can call it. It's a couple days later I got a bunch of the parts in. I'm very excited to see what we end up with. I'm also very excited to see what parts I still do not have and I do not know that I do not have. So this is basically gonna go it'll probably be like right here. That's just because when we set one of the recorders down here it's kind of seeing the top portion of the beam splitter a little bit this area instead of the center which would be ideal but just kind of working with what we got here. So to match the angle of which it's hitting the beam splitter glass we need to lift the first recorder up a little bit here. It'll make sense when it's all assembled or I don't know maybe it won't. These are going to go on the bottom of the of this thing the bottom mount. They're basically just going to extend here a little bit so that we can nail the L bracket in here like this to hold the camera. If I can hold it from down there then that's a good sign right? Hopefully you can see that. That would be kind of the setup. All right welcome back to test assembly number three. Here's the iPhone mount just needs something to basically hold the camera in place. Basically I just need to detach this piece and use this piece. I'm thinking we might have enough room to attach this guy like so to hold our recorder number two in place. So we'll just do it with no viewfinder. See how that turns out. Fits. Oh the lens kind of doesn't fit though. Final thing make this thing easier to hold. This is a grip definitely makes it portable. I need to figure out how to fix the angle of view on this though because the 35 millimeter lens is seeing a little bit past the beam splitter up here. If I could angle it like this and then I'd have to angle recorder number one down a little bit that would work out well. Assessment build number four I think. Things are looking a little bit different. If you originally remember the metal went up to here but it was causing a problem. We were kind of seeing off the top of the the beam splitter which was not good. So let's just assemble it back together and see what we're working with. See what new problems arise. I guess now we just need to add our ground glass and our recorder number two which is Caleb's Nikon F8. So now theoretically if I look through the ground glass I am seeing what the beam splitter is seeing. Finally the fruits of my complaining had paid off and I had a working completed build. Eager to get this field tested I decided to load up the cameras and get them optically aligned for battle. Alright camera number two this is Caleb's Nikon F8. I've never loaded this camera before but it's a Nikon. How hard can it possibly be? How do you load this? How the hell do you open this thing? Does it open from the other side? No the hinges are over there. There we go. So this is going to be recorder number one. It's going to capture the infrared film so let's go ahead and load this. Caleb's Nikon has the R72 filter on it which is pretty crazy. I'm going to make sure that's tight. Yeah there's a bit of a delay on one of them. Okay so I think this is now optically aligned. Do you see that the recorder number two and then that's the overlay the ghost image there is recorder number one. So I think they're pretty close. About as close as I'm gonna get them to be anyway. Well it's finally time to test out the beam splitter in the field and like a boat going out to sea for the first time I thought I'd christen it with some flaming hot Mountain Dew. So after hundreds of light meter readings reading through the beam splitter glass reading the light bouncing off the beam splitter glass I came to the conclusion that this is gonna be impossible and I should just give up. Okay that's a bit dramatic. I somehow managed to figure out that I could meter the scene at 100 ISO and then add two stops of light for the ectochrome which would be sitting on the bottom of the rig and absorbing the 30 reflected light and then on top of that an additional two stops of light compensation for the infrared film behind the visible light blocker. So that would be four stops over in total for the infrared through the beam splitter glass. Sounds pretty complicated right? It's actually pretty easy. He said is he totally f***ed up the exposure on the first shot. F8 500. Cool. Did it? Did it. There we go. So as planned when I took this photo of Monica I exposed the same shot on both Rolly Infrared 400 and Kodak Ectochrome E100. I decided to choose Kodak Ectochrome for the visible light color image of this rig because it's very closely related to Kodak Aerochrome. Anyway now how do we combine these two powerhouse forces together for the betterment of humanity and make Aerochrome? For starters on the ectochrome scan I'll bump the shadows exposure and contrast then right click and go edit in photoshop. Cool. Then I'll find the corresponding Rolly Infrared shot that has already been converted in negative lab pro and I'll lower the overall exposure a bit because it's a it's a bit hot and then go down right click edit in photoshop. Photoshop sucks ass but hey here we are anyway. Let's control A and control C copy the Rolly Infrared on over to the Ectochrome workspace. If you flip the all-seeing photoshop eye on and off you'll notice how big of a difference there is between the shots because the cameras were not actually perfectly aligned because at the end of the day I am only human as far as you know. With both shots selected we can go to edit auto align layers I usually leave it on auto and then slam the okay button. No power slam it. Great now we have to assign the infrared layer to the red channel and shift the ectochrome channels down accordingly kind of like real Aerochrome. With the top infrared layer selected let's go ahead and add a new adjustment layer channel mixer. This can be pretty dense stuff if you're unfamiliar with compositing or you just get headaches from doing simple tasks like me. So I'll just give you the photoshop GTA cheat codes that you'll need for this but fair warning if you do use them it'll give you five stars automatically so be ready. Flip your drop down menu here to green and set green to zero. Now flip your drop down menu to blue and set blue to zero. Now the whole comp is the red channel but we just want it to apply to the infrared layer. So grab your adjustment layer and infrared layer and merge them together. Now select your bottom ectochrome layer and add this same channel mixer adjustment layer. So time for some more cheat codes here flip the drop down output menu to red and change that to zero because the infrared is going to be acting as our sole red channel. Next flip the drop down menu to green and set the green value to zero then change red to 100%. Now the visible light red channel of the ectochrome is the green channel which is kind of like real aerochrome or so I've been told. If you want true 100% genuine aerochrome you can even flip the drop down menu here to blue set the blue to zero and change the green to 100%. I chose not to do this step in my shots because I gave the images a very strange green turquoise kind of look. The final step here in Photoshop is to simply take your top infrared layer and set the blending mode to screen so that all the pixel values get added together. Now you can save and jump back into Lightroom to make any final adjustments that you want or just delete the photo entirely because you hate it and you're just in one of those moods again. I personally did not like how turquoise the sky looked sometimes so I shifted the blues a little bit and occasionally there were sort of these blue purple random color casts in some of the shots so I balanced those out by going down to the split toning and adding some warmth to the shadows. And that's it. Now you can do this whole process again for every shot until it becomes muscle memory and you're doing it in your sleep at which point your partner, friends and family will start to be concerned for you unless you don't have any of those. Okay, one one thousandth at four, one two fiftieth so five hundredth. We're just gonna focus this set to infinity and beyond. All right, I hope these photos turn out and this isn't all just a waste of time. Okay, this is not a struggle at all. All right. Oh yeah, one five hundredth. If we can just get one photo that is not f***ed up, I will be happy. Okay, it's not a test video without the uh the pool shot. How ridiculous does this look walking around in public with this? Uh mildly ridiculous. It looks like a radar gun. I heard some people trying to figure out what the hell you were holding. What did they think it was? Um I heard them say something about like oh it's a light refractor. Light refractor. I guess what's a light refractor? I don't know. It's a beam splitter. So did this whole thing work overall? Yeah, I suppose. Kind of. It doesn't really look too similar to air chrome, at least in my own opinion. I mean you got the red orange foliage, but that's about where the look comes through a screeching halt. To me it looks like air chrome in the same way that s*** looks like chocolate. There were a handful of things that went wrong as well. Though I did my best, the cameras were not perfectly optically aligned. Additionally, while I was shooting, I literally couldn't see the composition whatsoever. I was basically just guessing, so a lot of them have a significant amount of headroom, which I think it'd be kind of nice if we could all just make a blood pact right here right now that that was intentional on my part and I was just trying to be artsy. Because the images weren't perfectly optically aligned, a feat that might be impossible just from eyeballing it, there is some prismatic aberration going on as well. Mostly towards the edges. And finally, because of the slight shutter delay between the cameras from the shutter release cable, some of the objects in the scene are misaligned. Like my spine. Probably now. 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And if you use the code grainydays at checkout, you can get 10% off your first purchase. So was this whole thing a worthwhile endeavor? I guess so. It's fun to try out new theoretical concepts like this, even if it doesn't really go your way all the time. Some of the photos look cool in their own right, but I don't really think it's the style or look for me. I need something a little bit more convincing. Maybe in the future, if I was doing some sort of project that would work well under this guys, then maybe I would consider it. Plus, would it really be worth it to haul around that heavy ass rig? Probably not. I'm pretty weak myself, and I can barely even carry your interest in this video up to this point. The cool thing is that this technique can be used in a variety of formats. I do believe with the build that I currently have, there is enough room to mount two Mamiya sevens and produce some six by seven fake Aerochrome. That might be a cool video. If you want to get really wacky, wet and wild, you could probably even do this with two four by five cameras and several tripods, but you ain't going to catch my ass doing that. Anyway, this was a fun theoretical video and hopefully it serves as a way for people to get excited about the campaign to get Kodak to bring back Aerochrome once and for all. But until I find a better solution, I'm just going to keep on chugging.