Posts from the ‘Color’ Category
Color Efex 4
5D, C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4, Color Efex 4
I occasionally test software for Nik. I got a chance to used the new Color Efex 4 and just received my copy. This is one of the images from the walk-about I did with the C/Y 50mm mounted on the 5D. There are lots of things to like about Color Efex 4, and I’m in the midst of preparing a blog post about the software.
More to come.
More color for Earl and Anita
Velvia
Hey, Earl & Anita, I had this color roll lurking and was planning to bring it out and post some. This was the last useable roll from the half-dozen rolls I sent off to North Coast. Glad you like my color. I may have to trot out my 5D and shoot some more in the upcoming weeks.
Ohiopyle State Park
One of the disadvantages of time and schedule is that I tend to hold on to rolls of film long after I’ve shot them before I get to develop them at North Coast. These images were all captured on a trip Peg and I took to Ohiopyle State Park last October. If you want to see other images from that trip, go here.
It is probably hard to see in these JPEGs, but the trees above and the red wagon at the top have almost a 3D quality to them.
Another casualty of the time was I’ve forgotten what camera I shot these with. I was carrying two cameras with me that day, the FTb and the EOS 3. My guess is this is the FTb with the 50mm 1.4, but I’m just not sure.
I had always wanted to shoot fall color with Velvia, and I was happy with the images from that day.
That’s all that day was about, just finding the color and capturing it. I had also shot a roll of Ektar that day, but the Velvia beat the Ektar hands down.
ISO 50 film with gentle overcast light = narrow DOF.
Fall in SW Pennsylvania is perhaps thew prettiest season.
Vancouver through the Eyes of Velvia
Velvia 50, Zeiss Biogon, North Coast Scans
So, in the set of rolls I sent off to North Coast was the last color roll I shot on my trip to Vancouver last November (good thing Vancouver is a fertile ground for photos, because I’m scheduled for THREE trips to Vancouver during the rest of this year — August, October, and November). As I looked over these images, that Zeiss and Velvia combo is quite magical.
The lens is contrasty and lord knows the film is contrasty, so sometimes the combination can be a bit much, but not so much if you really like contrast. Here’s an image shot on an overcast day, which mitigated the effect a bit:
Those colors still pop, which I certainly like, but. to my eye, not as harshly as Ektar. It is interesting to me how my tastes are changing.
Two years ago, I would have said that my favorite b&w film was HP-5 and my favorite color film was Ektar. Today, I’d say that my favorite b&w film was Tri-X and my favorite color film was Fuji 400H. How that happens’ I have no idea.
All I can say for sure is that, until the days comes where I can’t get my hands on the materials any longer, film is still my medium of choice.
For the right subject, Velvia really is hard to beat!
Color Returns
Fuji 160s, Canon FTb, 24mm FD
Just got back six rolls of color film developed and scanned by North Coast. Over the next few days I’ll post some of the images from that body of work. Most of the images were from the trip up the California Coast last January but there’s a roll from work I shot in the fall of last year and one roll from Paris. The Paris roll was damaged before I sent it out, however, as it went through the laundry and clothes dryer. I had it processed anyway, but my hopes for minimal damage were dashed a bit when the scanner tech enclosed a note with the rolls saying “did roll xxx38 get wet?”
Uh, yeah, it did. Upon very brief inspection, a few images might have escaped without wholly being lost beyond rescue, but I have yet to look at them very closely. I fear for the worst, however.
Links to great work, Vol. 1: Mike Peters
Today there is no new image from me (the scanner is running as we speak, working on rolls recently developed) so I thought I’d take a moment to begin a series of posts acknowledging great work done by fellow photographers.
The first such post gives kudos to Mike Peters, professional photographer employed by my old undergrad school, Montclair Univerrsity in NJ. I’ve only spent about five minutes in Mike’s presence (we met through a mutual friend, Kevin Allen) but we’ve corresponded through email and discussed photography at length. He occasionally takes time to comment on my work, for which I am grateful. Hopefully when I visit NJ in the future, he’ll let me buy him lunch.
Mike’s work is just astounding, and I really encourage my readers to go over to Mike’s site and view his work, and especially take time to go through ‘The Dream.’ It will be well-worth your effort. I cannot make it through that body of work without feeling a deep ache in my gut.
Thanks, Mike.
Kodachrome Arrived
My last roll of Kodachrome
The roll arrived with a KODAK Photo CD of the images. This is one of the few I liked. As you may remember, I shot the roll in a hurray, in bitter cold. A few interesting images, especially interesting in the way the film rendered the color. Nothing spectacular.
Last Set from Madeira
Portra 400VC, FTb, 35-105 FD Zoom
I didn’t get much chance to do much street photography while In Madeira; I spent the only couple hours I had to myself near the grounds of the hotel. But I got a couple shots.
It is an island full of color and culture, and I hope to go back some day and spend more time on its streets.
Curves
Everywhere you looked on the hotel grounds you found curves
Again
It was lovely really, to see something so intentional and the willingness to indulge that artistic urge. Straight lines are so much easier and cheaper to build
One of the things, on a side note, that I like about shooting film is that I have less post-processing to do, and thus can share more images with you.
My next trip will be to Los Angeles and San Francisco starting tomorrow. Going to be mainly carrying my FTb and Bessa in my new Domke F-803 bag. It’s wonderful
Happy 2011!
Portra 400 VC, FTb, 35-105 FD Zoom
Happy New Year to everyone!
While walking around the hotel in Funchal shooting b&w, I also had my FTb loaded with Kodak Portra. I shot two rolls, today’s images are from roll #1. These images do a better job, I think, giving you a sense of the way the hotel felt. While the curved lines predominated the shapes, the use of color also played an important part not to be dismissed.
Another foot
Don’t know why, but I continue to be attracted to this kind of image.
Pool area in color
As you might agree, the pool area feels better to me with the addition of color.
Christmas in the Tropics
Don’t need evergreens to get the whole ‘red and green’ thing going for Christmas in Madeira.
This shows the idea of the pool horizon meeting the sea better than my earlier b&w image. If only the sky wasn’t overcast that day.
There was a statue in the front grounds of the hotel of some well-known historical lady. I noticed a real flower placed in her hand as shown above.
This struck me as a very European motif in a couple of ways. First, while I can’t remember her exact story (I meant to write a couple notes down but forgot) she was not so much a political figure as a romantic one. While I believe she was a princess of some kind who had lived on the island, the details of her life revolved around her loves and life rather than her influence. While in the U.S. we do sometimes commemorate this kind of figure, we don’t often erect statues to people whose emotional tone we wish to remember so much as I think Europeans do, especially in romance-language counties. Maybe I have this wrong.
The second thought I had was the idea of placing a real flower in her hand, as shown. A very nice touch, and one that communicated that someone (a groundskeeper, perhaps) wanted her remembered in some way.
It was lovely, nonetheless.
To everyone who visits this blog, my thoughts are with you today, wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
Peace to you.
Fall color in Ohiopyle
Ektar, 24mm FD, FTb
One of the rolls I recently processed and received back from North Coast was a roll of Ektar I shot in October in Ohiopyle State Park on a day-trip with Peg. That day, as an experiment for me, I mounted a 24mm FD lens on my FTb. I normally don’t shoot that wide a lens as a walk-around lens. I use my 17-40 zoom on my EOS cameras all the time, but that lens has a safety factor, in that if I see a composition I like, and the lens is too wide, I zoom it back. Safety Factor. That day I was forcing myself to ‘see’ with a 24mm crop, as it were.
It was mid-October, not quite ‘full’ color, but interesting enough. I have posted in this blog before about Ektar, and the colors and contrast in these images are pretty much as received in the scans of the negs. The film has a particular color palette that some find pleasant, others not so much, but it scans very well.
It is kinda humorous to me that FD lenses in that focal length are now increasing in value on ebay owing to the newer digital cameras that accept adapters and can mount FD lenses. Those cameras have a 2x crop factor, so the 24mm lens would equal a 48mm on those cameras. Part of the reason I chose that lens on that day was to see whow sharp it was. As you can see from above, it certainly can hold its own.
A Particular Color Film’s Specific Color Palette
I had made a mention in the blog a while back about color films having a particular palette as chosen by the emulsion chemists and my comment was mis-interpreted, so I wanted to discuss it again and try to be clearer in my thoughts.
When any film manufacturer creates a film emulsion (B&W OR Color) they ‘build in’ sensitivity to the color spectrum as they desire to give a film a particular ‘look.’ One of the factors that plays into this decision is how the film renders skin tones, as many photographs are of people. In fact, I have read that Fuji in particular has emulsions specifically formulated for Asian skin tones that they do not sell in the West because it will do unflattering things to Western skin tones.
These formulations are created to deliver a certain ‘look’ to a film, a look that is pleasing in terms of its RED-GREEN-BLUE balance as well as facets such as saturation and contrast. When Fuji’s Velvia came out, it blew away Kodak’s offerings for landscape photogs because it rendered greens at such a saturation that such landscapes popped when photographed as compared to Kodak’s offerings.
This quality of the films has nothing to do with ‘white balance’ or ‘color of light’ per se, and assumes the photographer exposes the film in conditions appropriate to the film’s characteristics (daylight or tungsten). IT is, essentially, an artistic choice made by the film manufacturer.
So this image above would have been rendered differently if I had shot it with Fuji Pro 400 or Provia 160 VC. It looks like it does because I used Ektar.
My point in that earlier blog post was this: when we shoot digital RAW, that gives us almost unlimited potential to tweak the color and contrast of the captured image. This is a great thing. Wonderful thing. However, for those of us whose abilities may not be the best in terms of color palette or color mixing, can we do as good a job as the experts at Kodak or Fuji at making those choices?
I wonder.
There are a number of teachers who advocate shooting RAW because of the options it gives you. There are a minority of teachers who advocate shooting JPEG because of the simplicity of it but also because of the way it can emulate a film’s color balance. This is sort of what I am trying to say.
After shooting a number of rolls of color neg film in the past six months (for the first time in my life, really; 30 years ago I only shot chrome), I have begun to understand that point of view and, honestly, today I agree with it.
One last Ohiopyle shot from a roll of Acros I had loaded in my EOS from that day just to end the post.
I’m back with a cold.
Provia 400 VC
So I have returned from my trek across the pond, and quite a trek it was. I don’t have the images developed yet, so the images that accompany this article are the last images from the rolls I shot in Vegas (Provia 400VC). That film was not ass impressive as the Fuji, I’ll admit, but 400 ISO color film has certainly come a long way.
However, I thought I’d give you a quick summary of my adventures:
6:40 pm Wednesday: Leave Pittsburgh for Paris (travel time: 8 hours)
8 am Thursday morning, arrive in Paris to make my 1:30 connection to Lisbon.
Around 12pm, discover that the flight to Lisbon is delayed due to snow. Begin working to re-schedule my connection in Lisbon to Madeira.
The connecting flight to Lisbon finally leaves at 4:45, three hours delayed. I am now booked on a 9:15 pm flight to Madeira, the last flight out that day.
9:15 I leave Lisbon for Madeira, arrive in my hotel room at 12:45 am Friday morning. So, I have traveled about 26 consecutive hours that first day.
I sleep and get up at 7am for breakfast and a walk around the grounds of my hotel, taking pictures.
I go to my meeting at 10:30, meet, have lunch, meet, have dinner, and return to my hotel at 1 am to try and go to sleep and get up for the first part of my return leg beginning at 7:30 am the next morning. So, my time not traveling this day is 17 hours.
5 am rolls around and I take the taxi to the airport, and the flight to Lisbon leaves at 7:30. I arrive in Lisbon at 9:15 to discover that my return flight to Paris, scheduled for 11:30, has been canceled due to a wildcat strike by the Spanish air controllers. I get re-seated on a second flight, which in turn is delayed until 7:30 that night. I arrive in my Paris hotel room at 1 am (I had expected to get to my Paris hotel at 4-ish that afternoon to get in some late afternoon shots and then some evening shots). I decide to go to bed and get up at 6 to walk the streets around my hotel (still dark) to get whatever images I can.
I walk the streets of Paris from 6 until 7:30, go back, pack, and take the taxi back to the airport where I catch the flight back to Pittsburgh.
So, in between Wednesday night and Sunday afternoon I have about four hours of photography, twelve hours of meetings, six hours of sleep, and 54 hours of travel/waiting in airports, roughly.
It was brutal. But a good trip.
And I came back with a cold.
