Just before Christmas, I treated myself to a new film camera – something which hadn’t happened for a while. I’ve been exploring digital and all the convenience it brings, but since the launch of the Pentax 17, the half-frame format had been playing on my mind. After seeing a few examples of people creating diptyches with them, the temptation only increased… but being close to Christmas, the higher-end cost of the Pentax wasn’t an option. What if I splashed out then didn’t like the format (it’s happened before)?
Enter the Kodak Ektar H35N, a cheap and cheerful point and click camera. With no real controls to speak of (other than a star filter), it’s no comparison to the Pentax 17 – but it would be a good tester for whether the half-frame format was something I could get onboard with.
My first mistake was loading this bad boy up with a 36-exposure roll of Fujifilm Superia 400. 36 frames, doubled, gives 72 whole frames to get through before you can send it off for processing. At my glacial pace of photography, it meant that it took me roughly four months to get through a roll. That meant that I had photos from the Christmas markets in Bath, a wintery walk around Bristol harbour and a sunny springtime cycle under the suspension bridge, all on one roll.
My second mistake was taking it through an airport scanner on a trip to Edinburgh (during which I took no photos, so a complete waste) – the film was probably expired, and the x-rays likely also contributed to the grainyness of these shots. The smaller format may also have meant that grains were more pronounced on each image, but it didn’t detract too much from the shots I took.
Thirdly, I had assumed that ISO 400 would be fast enough to deal with a variety of weather and lighting conditions, but I was sadly mistaken, as most of my shots came out underexposed and a little fuzzy. Lessons learned here: nothing less than ISO 800 in future.
However, the real fun came when I got my scans back from the always-reliable and speedy Filmdev. Using Affinity Photo 2, I set up a black template slightly larger than two half-frame photos side by side, and pulled in shots to set up diptyches. I mixed up locations but tried to keep to a rough theme for each image.
Affinity Photo 2 was great for this task, as I could pull in a photo on its own layer and use the Develop persona on a photo at a time while they were next to each other, rather than having to process the photos separately and bring them onto the canvas afterwards. I’m still learning the best way to use Affinity Photo 2, and there have been some irritating moments (the inability to resize and save in batches is my main complaint), but this went surprisingly smoothly.
I’m pleased with the results I got, and I think arranging them in diptyches like this elevates the images from the low-quality, grainy snapshots they might be in their own, to something more when paired together. I don’t know if I’ll use the Kodak again – the build quality is pretty cheap and the winding-on wheel tends to cut into your thumb when you use it – but I’ll be keeping my eye out for cheap second-hand Pentax 17s in future.
