After I finally set up my bulk roll of Arista 400 Premium I took an evening (while watching a documentary) and rolled out about 12 rolls of varying lengths in the bulk cannisters that the old photographer who sold me the bulk roller had thrown in with the package.

That's one of the advantages of the bulk roller, you can make as long or short rolls as you want. So I made myself 12 shot and 24 shot rolls. My theory is that some days you want to shoot just enough to develop immediately, some days you want 24 shots to last a long time.

This is my sister-in-law and my nephew (who my parents say looks identical to my brother at that age -- I have to agree). The 50mm Takumar on a film body -- "full frame" to you digital shooters -- is really a nice lens for a portrait. On a digital body it remains a great portrait lens, only at a more 80mm-ish field of view.

The shots in this post are all shot with the Arista which some think is Kodak Tri-X. It does look like it, in my opinion. The heavy grain, the heavy grey, all look like it to me. Arista is the house brand of Freestyle photo, where I get the majority of my film consumables, so it is repackaged something.

I had one misstep in loading one roll into my Pentax Spotmatic. For whatever reason, the Spotmatic refused to advance after a few frames and by forcing it, the Spotmatic's gears began to rip out the sprockets in the negative. I had to cut it out of the camera (in the darkroom naturally). So I lost a couple frames out of that. I processed both halves of the roll successfully. Hopefully my era of missteps with bulk rolling are gone.

This is a hilarious list on Flickr of the number of ways you can fail at large format. I haven't personally tripped over all of these but enough of these mistakes are familiar that I was chuckling along all the same.

Last week I had the opportunity to use an anamorphic adapter to do some street photography during my lunch hour. This is really using movie equipment; overpowered but when you have access to it, you want to play with the toys. And so I did.

I said in my last post that I really love motion pictures and especially the extreme wide aspect of classics like the David Lean pictures, the Sergio Leone westerns. The widescreen technology in film was developed to make the theatre experience more than people could get on their early televisions. For my stills, I and every other photographer, am trying to find something that helps distinguish our work from others. So when I have a chance to try a new technology, just like they did with motion pictures, I'm going to jam it on my camera.

The shots you see here are shot through a Panasonic LA7200 16:9 lens mounted on top of a Nikkor 35mm mounted on my Canon 7D.