EP248: What College Actually Taught Me — Baby Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 with Kodak AeroColor III 2444

Roll #248

Film: Kodak AeroColor III 2444 (repackaged by Taobao seller "銀粒子排序", metered at ISO 50)
Developed & scanned: Violet Color, 2025/3/23
Camera: Rolleiflex 4x4 (Baby Rolleiflex) 60mm f3.5

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Today I attended the WordPress Rainbow Meetup in Taipei. During the Q&A, someone raised their hand and asked the speaker what their major was in college — the talk was about website color theory, so it was design-adjacent. On the way home afterward, I found myself thinking about what I actually learned in college that's relevant to what I do now. Honestly, I couldn't come up with much. If I had to name one thing, it would be this: I learned how to learn.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of leading with credentials. The version of us at twenty-something is nowhere near as capable as the version of us twenty years later — so what does your major from back then really say about who you are now? Asking someone what school they went to or what they studied is, more often than not, a way of slapping a label on them. A shortcut for thinking you understand someone without actually having to.

Sure, sometimes it's just genuine curiosity. But I think that's the minority.

The camera on this roll is the rare 4x4 format Rolleiflex, which uses 127 film — a format so obscure that many lab staff have never heard of it. From what I've found, two labs in Taiwan will handle it: Violet Color in Taipei, and Jin Ying in Changhua. Violet Color charges the same rate as 120 film. I haven't sent anything to Jin Ying, so you'd need to check with them directly.

Strictly speaking, 127 film isn't classified as medium format — but the film currently available for it (as of 2025) is almost certainly cut and repackaged from 120 stock, and handling it is no different in practice. So I still consider it medium format. Each roll only gives you 12 frames at 4x4cm, which does bring a certain deliberateness to the shooting process.

One downside worth knowing: the scanned file sizes from 4x4 are quite small. Because the lab scans it as 6x6 and then crops, a typical 6x6 scan from me runs around 4832x4760 pixels — roughly 23 megapixels. The 4x4 crop comes out at just 3219x3219, about 10 megapixels. The long edge doesn't even hit 4K resolution at 3840px. Not much you can do about it short of scanning yourself.

My Baby Rolleiflex is in exceptional condition — I genuinely don't know how I got this lucky. The craftsmanship is beautiful and I find myself wanting to shoot it constantly. Maybe that's the appeal of small cameras: they're light enough to make you forget you only have 12 frames.

A quick GrainHunter update: as of April 8, 2025, GrainHunter.com has 109 photos. I've completed the lens categories for Pentax 67, Pentax 645, Pentax Auto 110, and Olympus Pen F. Next up is the Olympus OM universe, which is the biggest one. To keep the build moving quickly, I'm starting with just one photo per OM lens — get the structure in place, spot problems early, fix them early. Once OM is done, I'll fill in the camera dimension, then the film dimension.

GrainHunter is a complex site. It's not tag-based like Flickr or Lomography, where everything connects through keywords. It uses a filterable attribute system — not a tree structure, not a flat tag system, not quite a neural network either. The best way I can describe it is a cocoon structure: from the outside it looks like a tangled ball of thread, but pull any single strand and it leads you to more related images through shared attributes — same film, same lens, same focal length, same aperture. Browsing it feels like unraveling something.

Back to work.

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#1
The first frame came out as a double exposure — not sure why. The goat image belongs to frame two; what I actually shot first was a Malayan night heron, whose silhouette ended up ghosted onto the goat's body.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#2
From frame two onward, no more doubles. These are the goats near my home. I'd gone out for a morning run, and my son wanted to come along — so he rode his bike while I ran. When we passed the goats, he got completely stuck there. It had been a while since he'd come to feed them.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#3
My son was completely absorbed in feeding the goats, so I just wandered around shooting whatever. His BMX bike.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#4
Testing the Baby Rolleiflex at minimum focus distance.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#5
Trying to photograph the goats, but they move fast — and with only 12 frames on 127, I couldn't afford to spray and pray.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#6
There's a sign posted at the goat pen saying only to feed the hay provided — no outside food. Most visitors ignore it entirely, so the goats just have to fend for themselves.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#7
Minimum focus distance again. At f3.5 the depth of field is razor thin.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/60, f3.5)

 

#8
My wife and son.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1/30, f3.5)

 

#9
Aperture test series begins. Wide open at f3.5.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1s, f3.5)

 

#10
I can't detect any sharpness difference between f3.5 and f4. That settles it — I'll just shoot wide open from here on.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1s, f4)

 

#11
The Baby Rolleiflex is already sharp at f3.5. Stopping down to f5.6 is just for depth of field control, not sharpness.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1s, f5.6)

 

#12
Pretty sure the repackaged film had a light leak here.
Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 (1s, f8)

 

That's the full roll — Baby Rolleiflex 4x4 60mm f3.5 with Kodak AeroColor III 2444. Thanks for reading.