Posts from the ‘Pittsburgh’ Category
Hazy Summertime
Pan-F, HC-1120 (H)
Scanning away here and came across a roll I shot with my Mamiya around July or so. It might have been in August, I honestly can’t rermember. I’ll post a few images from that roll in the next day or so. That day was hot and hazy, humid in that Western-PA sort of way. This is the point at which the Beaver River flows into the Ohio. The railroad bridge crosses over the point.
I worked on the image to try and capture that feeling, but seeing it on the web page leaves me feeling I missed it somehow.
More to come.
Catching up on my Scanning
HP5, DD-X
Continuing to catch up on my scans while I’m on vacation. It will end far too soon.
Fomapan 100
Beesa R2a, Zeiss ZM 35mm f/2, Clayton F76
This post concerns itself with the look of Fomapan 100. Now, as some of you know, at one point in my life I tried to find a way to emulate the look of film in the digital medium. I now believe that’s a fool’s errand, and if you want the look of film, you need to shoot film. That’s where I stand today.
Captured in the middle of June, 2011
And, so with that epiphany, I have embarked on a search for films that look as ‘non-digital’ as possible. Rather than try and bring the digital to look ‘like’ film, I now try to find and shoot film to look as ‘non-digital’ as possible. This is the reason behind the ‘old’ style developer in Clayton F76, and the look of an ‘old’ design in my lusted-after Zeiss 50mm Sonnar f/1.5, and so forth. Fomapan is an ‘old style’ emulsion, made in the Czech republic, and in June of this past summer I shot a couple rolls. The images in this post are from one of those rolls. I know the frames were ‘seen’ through a modern lens, but the rendering is, to my eye, a ‘classic’ look.
I don’t think I have the vocabulary to articulate the differences I’m seeing, but I do see it the way the steel of the arch renders.
Maybe it’s in the way the blacks fall off, and the softness of the mid-tones? Heck, I’m not sure.
But I sure like the way they look.
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.
Focusing Screens arrive at Patterns of Light n’ Dark!
C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 mounted on Canon 5D @ f/1.4
Using an adapter, this C/Y is a kind of poor-man’s Zeiss lens on my 5D. Now that I have the focusing screen, I can get accurately focused frames at f/1.4 (within human error, of course). I am a happy man, as this same lens works on my RTS II, my EOS 3, and my 5D. And, well, it would also work on my wife’s 40D and my old trusty 10D (albeit as an 80 mm equivalent).
This opens up new possibilities to me. It gives me a very nicely functional old-school film SLR, a larger, bulkier Canon film SLR, and a digital camera for less $$$ than the Zeiss new 50. Significantly less. Now, of course, there is a cost.
The door on my Saab with the 5D-C/Y combo
I don’t really think for a second the image quality is as good as the new Zeiss lenses made for the EOS mount. But it’s better than any 50mm I have for an EOS mount now, for sure.
Metering is a little tricky, in that when I mount the lens, the EOS cameras won’t read the actual f-stop, but they will read whether I’m over or under given the chosen shutter speed. But it is in old-style stopped down metering (the view frame gets darker as I stop down). But I incident meter a lot of the time anyway, so that’s no biggie if I’m shooting the EOS 3, and I can chimp with the 5D if I need to.
Switching the adapter if I switch lenses causes a little juggling.
Above image witrh the DXO Rollei preset
So, this is an overall good thing for me. Next post I will discuss my thoughts on my digital-raw-file-to-b&w-file using DXO or Nik Silver Effects workflow. While there are many ways to do this, I have some observations about this effort.
And, as always, there are more film scans coming.
Just some DXO doodling
5D, DXO Rollei conversion
Just playing around with the DXO film pack tonight. Original Image below. Just thinking through a workflow.
Unprocessed RAW file
Part of what I’m working on is “how much do you tweak the original RAW file before you do the b&w conversion? Do you make the original file ‘pretty’ as a color image and then convert it? Or do you leave it as natural as you can?” In other words, how do you get it into a state that replicates how b&w film would have ‘seen’ it?
Never really thought about this before.
New Combo?
Plus-X, N-1, Clayton F76
All the images in this post were shot Friday as a test of a lens/camera combo. I’m not going to be specific about what lens, just thought I’d put these out there for comment. reaction.
It is the same film/developer as the last set shot in the same general location (which is, incidentally, my walk from the office to my car).
I’d love to hear any thoughts.
Yes, this is an f 1.4 maximum aperture lens, and yes, on the image above I probably missed focus on the pull-chain. Just sayin’…
These images, to my eye, do have a ‘look.’
Again, love to hear your thoughts!
Plus-X Pulled in Bright Daylight
Plus-X Pulled on stop, Clayton F76, 50mm 1.4 FD lens, Yellow Filter
The first time I published some Plus-X pulled images, the lighting that day was overcast. Well, the images at the Cubs game were in daylight, but not really high-contrast daylight. Well, right after I returned from that Chicago trip, I shot a roll in bright daylight just to really test the combo. After all, those are the conditions pulling is designed to combat; situations where the light-to-dark contrast is too great for the normal 10-stop range. Here are some images from that shoot, scanned on my Epson and shot on 35mm Plus-X.
Notice also the specular highlights and how crisp the images are.
Remember, this lens is a mid-1970′s Canon run-of-the-mill 50mm. Not even an ‘L’ lens.
Shadow side of the building, bright sun across the street.
The yellow filter helps to darken the skies, certainly.
Tree in bright daylight, dark car in shadows
My Saab in the parking garage.
Now, I certainly like the Nik Silver Efex ‘pulled’ preset, and have used it many times. But it achieved nothing like this.
In my search for a look or ‘looks’ that cannot easily be replicated by digital, this i certainly one of them.
Thanks for looking!
Fomapan 100
Fomapan 100, Canonet, Clayton F76
I’ll wait to post more insight into the new scanner, but for the moment I’ll just post some images.
Strip District in Pittsburgh
When Paul Lester (ho, Paul!) visited in April, we walked around the strip district in Pittsburgh, which is an historic market district near the confluence. For that walk-about, I loaded Fomapan 100 in my Canonet, in order to maximize the ‘old school’ look.
Yes, that's Paul walking ahead of me
Fomapan is an old-style emulsion whose purpose is to harken back to the 1950′s. Perfect for a D76 developer and a 1960′s-designed camera. I’ll let the images speak for themselves.
I really love this combination of film and camera (especially the Canonet’s 40mm lens!). Too bad that after this shoot, the Canonet (bought from eBay for $60) sorta fell apart when I got it home. Trying to decide whether to fix it or just buy another one.
More soon!
EPSON V750 Pro First Thoughts
TMAX 100, Clayton F76, Mamiya,
Here are some of the first scans of medium format film using my new Epson 750 scanner!
Before I start, thanks again to my wonderful wife Peg for this gift!
As I am still learning the workflow [a task made a little more complex because Silverfast was good enough to grant me a free upgrade to Silverfast 8; (the scanner shipped with Silverfast 6.6 on DVD)]. I had made a set of first scans with 6.6; later ones (the ones I’m working on now while I write this) were made using 8.0. The workflow is very similar, but not identical, so I took a slight step back this morning in my efficiency as I sort out my proper workflow.
HP5, DD-X
This write-up should be viewed as a kind of ‘first glance’ at both the scanner and the software. Please excuse any flaws in the image caused by the photogrpaher. All of the images in this post have been ‘touched-up,’ but no more than I normally would. Straight-from-the-scanner versions can be downloaded from here. Caution: they run about 70 mb.
Before I began this adventure,what I had heard on the internet about scanning with a flatbed led me to believe it would mean two things to me: first, since I scan mainly 35mm film, the image quality would be slightly less (they would be slightly softer as compared to my Nikon 4000, and would require more sharpening, as well as the dynamic range would be compressed slightly), and second, that I would be finally able to scan medium format without paying $2000+ for a Nikon 9000 on ebay (Nikon stopped making this medium format scanner a while back, and the prices immediately skyrocketed; it was never cheap, however, even when they made them). That’s what I knew getting into this. But I didn’t know what else I would discover, and I hoped that the Silverfast software that came bundled with the scanner would at least partially mitigate #1. I had been using Vuescan software for years with my Nikon, and had a love-hate relationship with it. But more on that later.
HP5. DD-X
Pros of the EPSON:
- The time I spend scanning will decrease. While Silverfast indeed has a batch mode, I haven’t quite figured that out yet, so this could get even better. Even so, because all the frames are in their holders on the flat bed, I don’t have to futz with them after every scan. Thus, I have already seen a gain in that area. Additionally, the EPSON scans images faster than the Nikon at the settings I use.
- Because I can scan the whole lot of images at once, I get Contact Sheets very easily. I love contact sheets.
- Scanning medium format opens me up to other types of shots and other types of cameras.
- Silverfast seems to be a much more robust scanning environment, and is (for me) easier to use than Vuescan. Let me explain this a bit, as Silverfast does not have the most wonderful interface in the universe (although 8.0 is better than 6.6). Vuescan has many advantages. It is inexpensive compared to Silverfast. One software package works with every scanner (or, at least, many scanners). Silverfast sells you a separate scanning package for each scanner you own. Thus, the version I got with the EPOSON won’t work with my Nikon. I can see how that might anger many people, especially since the price is steep compared to Vuescan. I can’t speak for the motivation of Silverfast and their pricing model, but I can certainly see why people wanted to look for alternatives. For me, however, Vuescan was always quirky. Getting the settings the way I wanted them was counter intuitive, which made the following quirk worse. It would, from time to time, without any seeming reason, forget its settings. By settings I mean whether the image should be saved as a RAW file or a TIFF; what to do with the image after it was scanned (do I open it in Preview? Do I open it in Photoshop? Do I open a RAW file in Camera Raw?) and because setting that stuff was counter-intuitive for me, every time it would forget the settings, getting them back was trouble. Yes, it could save settings files, but even then, when I would load back in settings files that contained what I wanted, they wouldn’t be the way I had saved them. So I had multiple workflows for VueScan, depending which set of settings it came up with today. For me, this quirk made whatever advantages Vuescan had moot. I had longed for a scanning alternative for years, which is why I looked at Silverfast in the first place.
- I don’t touch the film as much. I just put it in the holders, and then I’m done. And loading it in the holders is easier than loading it in the Nikon holder.
Pan-F, Rodinal
Cons:
The film holders are skimpy, flimsy, even. One time when I closed the ‘flap,’ the 120 film curled and I didn’t know until I scanned an image and it was out of focus in the middle.
35mm film, especially Kodak film, curls both across the length and width when it dries )ilford not so much). The 35mm holders do a decent job of keeping the film flat, but they are not perfect. 120 film lays much flatter, and this doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem. Many people who use this scanner upgrade the holders through third parties.
Silverfast doesn’t give you RAW as a file choice. My ideal workflow in Vuescan was to scan the file as a RAW file then open it in Camera RAW, and adjust much as you would a RAW file from a digital camera. This was a good thing (when it worked — see above) and I liked working that way. My choices with Silverfast are TIF and PSD..
Pan-F, Rodinal
Sharpening
My sharpening is indeed different than it was. Compared to the RAW scans with Vuescan and my Nikon, the images do come out of the scanner a little softer and I need to be a little more aggressive with sharpening. If anyone knows a good book on sharpening, let me know, ’cause I need to know a little more than I do now, I think.
All in all, I’m very happy so far.
