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Tuesday, February 11, 2003

This morning I changed three things.

1) made a new Snoopy setup (this model is much brighter and doesn't have a spring inside).

2) I put my old HeNe laser into the setup instead of the new diode laser.  One odd bit is that according to the light meter I'm using (three photocells in series), it's just as bright as the diode laser.  This can't be right.  If it is right, there's something very much wrong with the diode laser. (later... It's possible that the solar cells are more sensitive to light at 633nm than at 650nm.  I've still got that on my to do list to research the sensitivity curve of these cells to find out for sure).

3) I made up a 5% sugar water solution and soaked a piece of film in it for 20 minutes.

After letting the film dry I put it into the film holder and exposed it for 7s.

The film went to D2.0 less than a minute indicating overexposure.  This isn't too surprising since the water soak is supposed to increase the speed of the film.  It looks like it may have doubled or tripled the speed.

How did the hologram come out?  It was massively overexposed with a 7s exposure (no doubt due to increased film speed from the soak) but came out a nice golden color and is fairly bright in sunlight and dimmish under 20W halogen bulbs.

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Ahhh, success.  Well, more than before anyway.

This morning I burned two pieces of film (holograms #14 & 15) and both produced nice bright holograms visible in sunlight.  What did I do?  Two things

1) For the first hologram I added a fixer step using undiluted Kodak fixer (cat #837 5909) for 1 minute.  The film was exposed for 3 seconds and otherwise processed per the JD3 instructions with the fixer inserted between the developer and bleach steps (and lots of rinsing in between).  

2) For the second hologram I soaked the emulsion in a 5% sugar solution for 20 minutes, squeegeed, dried, exposed for 1 second and processed as normal per the JD3 instructions.

Both holograms are clearly overexposed (I really need to get some additional lenses that will spread the beam faster) but they're visible in white light.  Progress!

Sunday, February 16, 2003

After getting home really late from work (12:30am) I ran another piece of film (hologram #17) through my lab.  This one was made using a lens scrounged out of an old cd player and allows me to spread the laser light enough to cover the scene better (although not evenly).

For this setup I used Kodak fixer again and the hologram came out a nice green although a bit grainy.  It's also underexposed due to the fact that I didn't attempt a light-meter reading and set the exposure by "guess".  I'm still working through the best ways to make a reliable light meter. 

Rebuilding | Week 1 | Week 2/3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 10 | Misc Thoughts