Category: Carlsbad

Squaresville, man. Squaresville.

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New camera. Well, “new” to me. A Mamiya C330 Twin Lens Reflex. Shoots 6×6 negatives, like a Rollie or a ‘Blad. I’ve been interested in the format, and in something Medium Format that is more portable than the GX680. Mamiyas are pretty cheap, have good reputations for the quality of the glass, and seem to fit the bill. My excuse was that I may never bond with 6×6, and Hasselblad is 3-5x the price for everything. It’s not like you can’t sell a camera for what you paid, easily, but let’s be real. If I bought a ‘Blad I’d be sitting on $3500 worth of gear forever, because we all know I’d never sell it.

I was a little worried about shooting handheld, some people seem to think they’re too large. They weigh over 3 lbs with a lens! But my Brobdingnagian GX680s laugh at your puny little 3 lb TLR and I had no problem getting nice handheld shots. I only blurred one of the 12 on my first roll, all shot with the waist level finder. I think my only issue is that I need practice on the reverse image in the finder as I can get it framed side to side, or perfectly straight up and down, but not both at the same time.

One more thought. The lens is ridiculously sharp, all the way out to the corners. The first roll was Delta 400, which I am beginning to really love. I could have used Delta 100, but I had planned on messing with a red filter and thought the 2 stops would be welcome, but i got too excited and killed the roll before I got around to it.

Most of these are F11 or F16 (no meter with me, so I sunny 16d it) and 1/125 or 1/250. A couple were at F8. Check out the detail on this pinecone, which is cropped from the image posted in the gallery, and realize this is the economy, low resolution scan:

I might have a go at one or two of these negatives with my scanning rig to really see what the resolution is like, but I’m impressed. I think that’s all I have to say. I won’t share the ugly image, but I will show you the rest of the roll. Behold!

And here’s the higher res. Again, these are the cheapie scan, only 2000 pixels total, and they are this sharp.

How Often Is There Lightning In Carlsbad?

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How often do you see lightning here? Never. That’s how often. Well, almost never. So these are a rarity. I only got a very few, and didn’t get to play with settings much, but the fact that I had a chance at all is kind of special.

The first couple with the 24-200 lens, the rest with the 20mm. I tried different apertures and opening times, but this was mostly a wild guess. Hold the shutter open 20 seconds or whatever and then hope the lightning… lightnings.

Behold!

Velvia in 135

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I got a chance to shoot some slides in the F6. Not a fan of many of the film stocks I’ve tried in 135, just for the added grain, but slides in 120 are pretty much grainless. I have been excited to shoot a roll and see how good they might be. In fact, I’d have tried this before, but everyone was out of stock on Velvia in 135 until recently, when I found it at some random photo business at a bargain price of about a dollar less than other stores’ list price! So, still about twice as expensive as negatives, both for the film stock and for the developing. Shit’s not cheap, yo.

Results are spectacular, though. It takes a bit of thinking to shoot. I mean, it’s still iso50, so not exactly action film, but that’s not too much slower than Ektar, which I have to overexpose 2/3 of a stop for consistent scans. And holy crap are the results spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Ektar, but geez the hyper-real, over saturated colors of Velvia are special. And it’s grainless enough I’d be glad to make some pretty large prints from these slides.

Of course, it’s still slides. You’ve heard all the warnings. Better for low contrast scenes, not a lot of dynamic range, just straight up blows out highlights negative film would be a lot more gentle with, so you’d better get your metering right, and all that. I shot in full sun, cloudy, night, crappy light, and a variety of subjects just to get a sense of it, so the gallery is totes random. It’s fussy in bad light, but when the sun’s out it’s holy shit beautiful. Does amazeballs things to the sky at sunset, too. The sunset shot here is just the scan shrunken down to a webbable jpeg, nothing done in the photo shops to boost the colors. The slide itself is actually MORE vibrant.

Behold!:

Ilford FP4 and Ektar

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Working with some older manual cameras the last week. Specifically an F3 and an FM3A. The Ektar shots here are from the FM3A, the B&W are Ilford FP4 in the F6. I think the Still I Stand shot is a winner, the rest are mostly trash. Partly because they’re just snapshots as I was excited to try out my new old camera, but also because the scans are kind of terrible.

There are horizontal stripes in the skies of many of the shots, especially the Ektar. I’ve had this issue in the past and it is not on the negatives (or the slides, I’ve had it with Provia, too, and with medium format negatives) and I’m just not sure why it’s happening. At this point I’m convinced the lab’s software is shit, and these are JPEG artifacts, as they are almost exactly what happens when I try to reduce size on a digital shot from the Z6.

The thing is, I don’t get why this happens from the originating scan. Shouldn’t it be like a full sized digital image? Are they reducing it to make it smaller for the download and just overcompressing the jpeg? Whatever it is, they claim they can’t seem to see it at the lab and, frankly, I can’t not see it. They say nobody else has the problem, but I just cannot imagine how that is true! I don’t know if I want to even bring it up again, I’m getting a reputation as the complainer, but I’m to the point where I think I’m going to have to rig a light source for my camera and a macro lens and just scan my own.

Whatever. I’m just really fucking annoyed. Here’s what I came up with. I didn’t bother to pick and choose, this is any of them that aren’t blurry because I can’t focus.

Tilt Shift Tests

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As you saw in a previous post, I broke out the GX680III (not S) to practice with tilting the lens. I got that roll of film back yesterday. It was Fuji Provia 100F.

You remember that I began in the yard with the stump in the foreground and the palm trees in the background. I think I tilted it slightly too much, in the full sized scan the telephone pole is tack sharp about to the crossbar, then rapidly becomes blurred above that. I took a second and it’s sharp top to bottom, but I had lost the light even before the first exposure, so the second is even more bland. I won’t share.

The second test was to haul it to the lagoon trail, where I took pictures of the flowers with the train in the background. That worked out well, the telephone poles in the distance are also perfectly sharp and the shrubbery just a couple of feet in front of the camera are in focus. I purposely wanted to get 1/30 or 1/60 to get a sense of movement on the train and would not have been able to get those near flowers and leaves in focus at that speed without the tilt. I’m starting to understand how it works in real life.

The others were just DoF tests, but I’ll post them because they’re nice scans. Have I mentioned how much I love slides?

It says ‘I Choo Choo Choose you’, and it has a picture of a train

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Trying to get pictures of trains today. I dragged the Fuji out, with the goal of practicing with the tilt to get flowers in the foreground and a 1/30 shutter speed on Velvia to get a slightly blurred train in the background with sharp surroundings. It all sounds like a lot of work for two frames, and it is, but I also caught a freight train that I didn’t realize was coming, so I climbed out onto a rock in the lagoon to get a perspective that’s hard to nab with the giant camera.

There was a nice lady on a paddleboard in the water just to my right who was chatting with me while I was climbing down the rocks. She caught my attention as I was hiking out and told me she hoped the pics come out — she had counted the cars on the train and everything. Nice to know someone was pulling for me.

The setup, I was looking for flowers in the foreground:

The train tracks run across a bridge. I took one less florid train shot from the trail, but the best digital shots were from along the lagoon, or perched on a rock a couple feet out into the water.

And, since I have nowhere else to put them, here are some random pics from along the trail, and a couple from Terramar that I took over the weekend. I had the Z6 set up for landscape, but the reflections on the water were so amazing I really wished I had the long lens to get some shots of the egrets. Another day.

Sunset Studies

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More shots from that card I left in the Z6 for a month. These were taken March 2nd and the rocks have now been completely covered by the dredging work going on in the lagoon, so it’ll be different next time I go there with a camera. Nothing interesting in a clear blue sky, so I spent time playing with reflections. Kind of wish I’d hauled the ND filters along so I could stop it down and get some long exposures of the water flowing around those rocks, but I was traveling light so I just went for the reflections.

Really nothing special here, but I bothered to pull them into the photo shops so I might as well share with the four people who have ever looked at this page.

Behold!

Digital Dump

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I haven’t been using the digital much. I still take shots on occasion, but haven’t the patience to actually pull them into the photo editing software and upload them and all that. But this weekend on a walk I saw a graffito at a park where I occasionally take photos and play with dogs, so I went back the next day with the Z6 and did some studies on composition. Specifically Steelyard, which has been my composition study of choice the last few weeks. In these images there are three steelyards each: picnic tables, trash cans, and trees. Composition studies are a good use of digital, you can a bunch of perspectives quickly, and I kind of liked the angles on a couple of these. Plus, the irony of a nearly idyllic vista with that hidden message tickled me so I finally dug into what was on that memory card. I also got the dredge photos off the card — another steelyard study — and some random shots of other fun stuff.

First, those steelyards:

I also found some photos I took as the storms were blowing through a while back, the first set while taking slides of the dredge in Agua Hedionda, and the second set while braving an approaching storm. As you can see, I was definitely facing the wrong way for the storm clouds as to the east they were an otherworldly pink and purple, but my subject facing south never quite went off. The pelicans still made for a fun picture of the powerplant, though.

This one should be a direct comparison to the Ektar and Velvia shots, it was taken at the same time in the same light, using the same 1 stop GND filter — I actually took this then snatched the filter out of the holder and held it in front of the film camera. Thus one is using a 20mm lens, so slightly wider than the 50mm on the GX680, so I cropped it to be about the same perspective. In fact, I’m going to try the comparison tool, before is Z6, after is Velvia, and then I’ll put all of them in a gallery so you can see the Ektar too.

The Ektar shot below was with an 80mm lens, so that’s not a crop. Pretty sure I shot it, put the filter on the digital and let it fire on the timer (I have ten frames of this on the card) while I swapped a fresh roll of Velvia in the other film back, then shot the Vevia. I have a shot at 80mm and this at 50mm, which Is my favorite. It was the last one taken before the light subsided, and that was the perfect moment. It didn’t last more than 30 seconds before the sun went behind another cloud, and the light before was nice, but still a little subdued. The Ektar and Digital aren’t in as good a light, for certain. The difference two minutes makes.1

It amazes me how much both of the film types hype the magenta cast from that cheap ass formatt-hitech RGND filter. Also how vibrant they are, especially the slides. When editing the digital I kept thinking “I’m comparing this to film” so I didn’t hype the colors or anything, then when comparing it directly to the slides it feels like I could have boosted the vibrance all the way and never gotten close. I’d go back and play with the white balance, make it vivid, and all that, but I think I mentioned I don’t have the patience for that shit. If you want a print I’ll make you one of the Velvia shot. I ran a proof last week and it’s spectacular.

Nikon Z6
Velvia 50

I also discovered some ladybugs I’d taken pictures of. There’s a bunch more on the card, but I’m bored of photo editing, so here’s a ladybug and I’ll call it a night.

1. That’s what she said.

More Velvia

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Velvia 50

Shots of the dredging in Agua Hedionda and afternoon at the park on Buena Vista. Can’t believe I didn’t notice the dredging barge had moved so far while I was swapping out film and I cut off the flagpole. Dammit! Someone was chatting with me while I was working and I wasn’t paying enough attention. I now know that she has a Mamiya and took photography classes in the 90s, and that I should recompose my damned shot when I look away from the scene for more than a few minutes.

Velvia 50

Fuji Film Samples and a Rainbow

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The same week as the previous post I took some shots with the GX680 using some Fuji films. This week I got a roll of Fujipro 160NS negatives and Provia 100F slides processed. The first scan had one a little wonky and I asked to get it rescanned, but they did all of both rolls a second time. I actually think they came out better the second time, and I don’t know why. Something to consider going forward, I guess.

I’ll just dump a few samples here. Look at the file names to see what film they were taken on.

I don’t mean to make too many conclusions just yet, but first impressions are that I LOVE Provia 100F. It isn’t over the top extra like the Velvia 50, which I also love, and the extra stop of speed is welcome. It’s not posted here, but I took a shot of sleeping tiger up one stop and it is very washed out with an ugly color shift, so Provia doesn’t have any better exposure lattitude than Velvia, but I expected that. The negatives are nice, too. I wasn’t sure the first time I tried 160NS, but it’s kind of growing on me. I’ll post more samples of it later.

And this afternoon I made the mistake of not going out with the camera. It was raining and DARK grey so I stayed at work, but minutes before the sunset the clouds cleared out. The sky was spectacular, I could have killed the roll of Velvia I am dying to get developed but still has 3 frames to go.

I did catch some shots of a rainbow that ran from end to end and was as intense as I’ve ever seen. I actually ran inside to grab my 20mm because I couldn’t get both ends in frame at 24mm, but it was dying out by then. Still fun, I go three or four years at a time not seeing one, and almost never as intense as this.