This image took a little bit of a processing journey to arrive in the form you see above. Captured on Ektar, scanned at North Coast, imported into Lightroom. Cropped, then exported for processing into Nik Silver Efex: Pulled 1 stop, Delta 100 film preset (mainly for the color rendering), then selenium toned.
I liked the dreamy quality of the combination. This image was shot in Redwood Shores, California, on the trip in the middle of February. It was very foggy that morning.
"I don't think that looks like an 81a . . ."
Heh, so sometimes I can get myself into trouble. Last fall, in the middle of fall foliage, Peg and I went to Allegheny Cemetery. I took the 5D with me as well as the F100 loaded with Ektar. Being a reader of Mr. Rockwell, I was taking his advice and put an 81a filter on the lens, hoping to add a little punch to the warm tones of the leaves. Ahem, warm indeed.
I sent the roll off to North Coast (this is the same roll that had the image taken on the street I posted a while back on the street of the South Side of Pittsburgh here). The first few frames of the roll were taken on the street, the rest in the cemetery with the filter.
The phone rings one day after I shipped off the film. On the line is the tech at North Coast who is doing the scanning. She telling me that the images display a large color shift, and asks whether I want her to color correct during the scanning. “They were taken with an 81a,” I tell her. “No, don’t correct.” “OK,” she replies. “Just checking.”
I get the roll back, and the cemetery shots all look like this. I’m flummoxed. I look through my filter kit, and can’t find a filter that would have given me this acid-yellow. I continue to be flummoxed until I pack the Mamiya 645 for the trip to California.
I put the 8mm lens on the camera and take the lens cap off. There, in all its glory, is a deep yellow b&w filter. The light bulb goes on (dim though it may be). THAT’s the filter I had obviously used on the F100 (either thinking it was an 81a by mistake) or had been left on for a roll of b&w I had shot.
I used an 81a on that same trip (a REAL 81a this time) and can’t wait to see the results.
But, can you imagine what that scanning tech thought as she got off the phone with me? “81a my a–.”
Ektar as scanned
This week I got some film back from North Coast they had processed and scanned for me. I had sent them a roll of Ektar I had shot in Sept-Oct with the F100 I had purchased. I had exposed the roll as a test, more or less. A couple things struck me when I looked at the roll, and here on this snowy day in Pittsburgh, I’ll take a little time to go through them.
First off, what a great film. It had been a while since I shot a roll, and seeing these images just reminded me. This image above couldn’t be a better example. Pros who shoot film do so quite often because it saves them time in the long run. They don’t have to do much to the images once they get them back from the lab. This image above is a classic example. The image couldn’t have been shot simpler: F100, Nikkor 50mm lens, manually focussed, AE exposed by the F100, no filters. It’s around noon in September on Carson Street. Look at the colors! Look at the sharpness of the image! The sky! The contrast! My word. If you want a closer look at the grain/sharpness, I did a 2:1 enlargement in Lightroom and grabbed the screen. Take a look at the menu board in the middle of the image on the sidewalk:
Showing grain and sharpness
I think this image speaks for itself. Again, we’re talking about a Nikon lens, Series E, 50mm, 1.8, probably was a standard lens on a Nikon F4 or something.
And the color rendition of the Ektar. Here’s a shot of the hood of a car parked on the street just to my left when I captured the image above:
Ektar again
The rest of the roll I shot with the eye of doing black & white transfers. Later today, I’ll post some of those images. Now that I have my Mamiya 645 back, I’ll be ordering some Ektar 120, you can be sure of that.
As I remember it
Perception vs. Reality. I downloaded George DeWolfe’s PercepTool today to play with it a little. A short description of this PS plug-in is that it is designed to alter the contrast ratios to more closely approach the way we originally saw the image before it was compressed onto film or digital. Not quite HDR, but in the same ballpark.
I selected an image I shot on Ektar at McConnell’s Mill that I liked (that contrasty combination of Ektar with the Zeiss 35mm f/2 lens) and then I played with the PercepTool. I’ll be posting some other images soon with this combo.
Below is the image before I put it through the ringer.
She's had a little work done
At this moment I work on my laptop. The laptop has Lightroom on it, but not Photoshop. I await the glorious reunion of my stuffs from my Mesa apartment and my house in Pittsburgh. In the meantime, I do not have access to all my photo editing tools. So, for that reason and others, I’ve begun playing with the ‘dodging and burning’ available to me in Lightroom. This image above has been heavily dodged and burned. I’m trying to make that work invisible to the observer. I’m getting better at it, but I don’t think I’m there yet.
I pulled out this older image to play with because it was shot on Ektar 100, and as I mentioned in my last post, I was eager to get to use my newly purchased Mamiya 645e and shoot some Ektar 120. Well, 645e arrived yesterday from Adorama and it was broken. Not damaged in shipment, mind you, but broken as in ‘clearly not functional to any idiot who would have picked it up and shot off a couple test shots with it before they shipped it’ broken. Every time you turned the film advance lever to go to the next frame, the shutter fired when it reached the end of the stroke. Normally, the film advance locks at that point, but I could twirl the film advance all day long and the shutter would fire again and again and again in a never-ending stream of unusable film. Yeah, I’m a little miffed. It was rated by Adorama as in “E-” shape. That means one grade below “Excellent.” Cosmetically, it looked beautiful, no nicks dings or scratches. Looked perfect right out of the box. No so much with the properly operating, though. It’s going back.
Earlier today I shot a portrait for a colleague who is going to speak at a conference in Korea. She needed a portrait for the program. I’m going to ask her if I can post the selected image and talk about the shoot a little. It was the first time I shot a formal portrait (with lights and stuff) in thirty years. It was really interesting, and I learned a lot.
From that first roll of Ektar, shot at Cathedral Rock, scanned
The local university, Arizona State, has a photography program, one that bestows an MFA. I have been asked a couple times to give a guest lecture on that campus (about video game design) and on one such visit got to meet a professor in the photography department, who informed me (interestingly) that all the students there shoot film, which they then scan. No digital. The reason is driven by two factors: first, they print big. I mean BIG. Second, to get digital backs that would let them print that big would be too costly, so they shoot 4×5 and, in some cases, 8×10, and then scan on an Imacon. I remember walking into the room outside the scanning room, and being stunned that all the students were sitting there flipping through their three-ring binders, looking at their negs. In today’s age, I wouldn’t have thought ‘film’ at a major university. Good for them.
On Monday, one student of that program was displaying his thesis, and the opening was that evening.
On a separate-but-related note, locally there is a strong, vibrant group of film photographers who shoot large format (4×5, 8×10, and bigger). This is, I believe, partly fueled by a local teacher who himself is an advocate of large format. I had contacted one of those gents and it turned out he was attending the thesis opening. His named is Rich Coda, and his blog entry about the event be found here. Lovely guy, great work, and (perhaps most importantly) he originally came from Jersey and actually studied a bit with my first teacher, Klaus Schnitzer. Hey Rich! (wave)! Please go visit his blog, his work is quite lovely. I’m adding Rich to my blogroll. I mean, after all, haulin’ those big cameras around has to get you something, right?
You can see some of the BIG images on display in Rich’s blog entry about the evening.
It was a thesis show, with all that entails. Some great work. Anyone who has gone to art school knows whereof I speak. But it was great to get out, see lots of photographs (even non-thesis students had their end-of-the-year projects on display), hang out with other photographers, etc. One editorial comment: clearly all art schools must teach ‘pretension’ along with composition and technique, because if I read one more ‘artist’s statement’ about ‘metaphor’ and ‘nothing-ness’ I think I would have lost my dinner. There was exactly one (count ‘em, one) statement that I thought was honest when talking about the work. That student talked about how her grandfather had passed away and she had gotten permission from her grandmother to go through his room and gather photographic snippets of his things, his life. That series was very moving.
One last note, some changes are coming to the blog. I found a theme a like better than this one, one where the images can be larger. the type smaller, the look a little cleaner, all my favorite plug-ins supported. I’ll probably take a stab at the change-over this weekend. One of the things I have to determine is whether is should up-size the old images or just bite the bullet and leave them. Experimentation will continue.
Ektar, 17-40mm f/4 lens
First roll of Ektar back from the lab. I think I’m going to really like this film. This image is straight from the scan, no tweaking at all.
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