I took some photos of bands playing at Baba during the art walk in June. A few of them were pretty good, so I thought I’d share. I really like a couple of Cameron, and the shots of Mitch are not bad, though that may be sentimentality speaking.
These were on Portra 160, taken with an F6 and an F3. Lab scans — I really should redo these myself, but I’m too lazy.
I also took some photos of the first band, On The Menu. There was just too much going on, too many people around, and too much in the way to get good framing. But it’s not always about the photos themselves, sometimes it’s about the good people in them. Here are a few of my favorite.
These weren’t at the Art Walk, they were taken another evening. However, they were on the same rolls of film and they’re music, so why the heck not.
This is the Soto Six. Three of them, at least. They play at Baba every Friday and I occasionally decide that it might be fun to try and get some shots with the Baba logo for Rob and Reegan. These shots were taken July 1, 2022. Portra 160 and Tmax100 pushed 1 stop.
I had my cameras out at the Art Walk, trying to capture some of the bands playing at Baba that afternoon. It was all rather a mess, but I captured a few, and it was my last chance to do so, so I thought I’d share the final one. Portra 160 taken with the F6 and a 70-200 f/2.8 VRII.
Behold:
Nothing else to say right now. I’mma just sticky this on the blog. I have a few other nice shots, I’ll post them later.
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.
I’ve been shooting different black and/or white film stocks, just so see what’s what. Got a day with perfect clouds, to the east, so I just walked around and did some composition studies while burning film. I wish I’d had the Delta100 or Tmax in, but I hadn’t expected the lovely skies that evening. Had to take advantage of it while it was there, so 400 speed it is.
I also think I’d have enjoyed a yellow filter. Something to really pop those clouds, though I have to say that I was surprised at how dark the awning on the liquor store is (blue) and how darkly the green trees were rendered. These aren’t my scans, they’re the bargain scan from my developer. But I like the composition enough on a couple of them I might have at ’em myself, see if I can do a better job.
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.
Black and white has been interesting to me for years, but I haven’t been shooting it much since I started with film again. I’ve used some HP5+, and one roll of Delta 50 that I pretty much universally underexposed, and that’s it for true B&W. I also shot some of the XP2 that you develop in C41, and I like it, but that was 6 months ago. So I grabbed a few rolls each of some film stock that interests me and one of my cameras will be loaded with B&W all the time until I have tried them all.
The stocks I chose were Delta 50, Delta 100, FP4+ 125, and XP2 Super all from Ilford, and Acros from Fuji. Maybe I have an HP5 roll here, too, I would have to look in the refrigerator to see. I also have a bunch of Delta 3200 and XP2 in 120, which was a gift from the man I bought my GX680 from. I’ll try to get to now that I have a third back for the 680s and can keep B&W loaded and still have a back for slides and negatives. I’d really like to convince some people to sit for portraits with the 120, and I learned that Delta is actually native a lot slower than 3200 (800 speed? I’d have to look) so I could probably get some with acceptable grain even doing something stupid like street photography with 10 lbs of medium format camera hanging from my neck. I might haul that around the village and ask people to let me take portraits as a lark. But for now it’s 135.
You might remember the first roll, which was was FP4 in my F6. I posted some samples here a couple weeks back. It’s a usable film, and I even think this one was a genuine winner:
I did the same with the current roll of FP4, just taking shots of random subjects. I was using the F3 this time, which has a center weighted meter instead of a matrix like the F6. I don’t know if I’ve bonded with it yet, though it is a great camera. I definitely underexposed the portrait I shot not realizing it was 80% center weight. I need to remember it’s like the middle setting on the F6 switch when I’m searching for shadows. Maybe narrower, even, as the FM3a is 60% CW. The F3 is almost a spot by comparison.
I got some good shots, and I didn’t always shoot when the light was great because, frankly, I was getting impatient to burn the roll and get it processed. I didn’t bother worrying about the subject matter either, I just wanted to shoot something.
I’ll say this, FP4 is good film. I like it, It’s more contrasty than I expected, and it can be super sharp. I’m really impressed with the details I pulled out, even in tougher light. I will be happy to shoot this in bright light in the future, and I might even do some DR5 processing and make slides.
Here’s a dump of some of the roll. Random subjects. Random lighting. Even a bunch of balloons, one of each color, like I’d planned a test. I got lucky on that one. Behold!
Shot some Portra 400 in the afternoon light. Clouds, then sun, then clouds… definitely spring weather in Carlsbad. No great art here, but I have been jonesing to try new things, including messing with different focal lengths and using the tilt/shift on my camera. At 400 speed I was using too high an F-stop to really emphasize the effect here, but the Velvia shots of the bass and the Neville have the grass a touch more out of focus while the strings stay in sharp focus.
So, these are nothing special, thought I really enjoy how inconsequential the grain is on the 6x8s after shooting the Fuji consumer 400 on 135 last week. That shit’s just plain fuzzy! I never bothered to share, they’re trash shots, but now I know why that film’s so cheap. But I digress. For now, these are here so I can share them with friends. Behold!
I have had a roll of Velvia in the GX680 for a month or more, so I took some pictures of guitars to burn it off the last couple images. I used the tilt-shift to get the entire neck in focus in an attempt to learn how that works and I’d like to claim that I now have it perfect, but you can see I cut the end off of my new bass, so obviously I tilted but didn’t appropriately shift. That sounds like a metaphor of some variety. Alas, it’s literal.
By new, I mean the bass is only new to me. It’s actually 35 years old. I snagged it at a yard sale two weekends ago. It was filthy. So filthy I am kicking myself for not taking before pictures now that it’s done.
It had been hanging neglected for two years since it’s previous owner, Phil, passed away, and was completely covered in dust and grunge, displayed lying in the dirt. I wanted a P Bass to replace the Squier I have now, and literally decided to start looking 3 days before the yard sale, so I was primed to buy. I figured a mid-80s Made in Japan jazz neck was exactly what I would get if could choose anything at all, so I snagged it figuring it would be an ugly duckling that played great. Except, when I washed the grunge off, it isn’t ugly at all. The hardware is near mint and the paint is as good as you’ll find for a 35 year old instrument, only showing its age by having been sun-tanned to a darker, golden cream that’s even nicer than the original cream color (which I can compare as it is hiding under the pickguard). Not a bad score. And it plays perfectly after I set it up. I took Phil’s ridiculous chickenhead knobs off and returned it to it’s appropriate dress, but I left the shamrock sticker. A random sticker and ridiculous knobs pretty much summed up Phil’s entire aesthetic. He was eccentric, and a good guy. It’s nice to have something of his around the house, so it will continue to wear his random decorating as a small tribute.
The first four images are on Velvia 50, which I love more than I can adequately express. The slides are even more amazing than these tiny, compressed files can begin to show. This film stock is amazeballs. The last three are digital images, just depth of field tests, here so I can show them to a friend.
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.
These photos are from the first roll of Cinestill 800 I shot. I was interested in the film because it is for artificial light, and some people were raving about the halos. It’s motion picture film and the anti halation coat is stripped so it can be processed using C-41. The creative possibilities, taking pictures indoors and with odd effects, seem to tickle a lot of people.
I hate it. The halos just look like shit. The colors are not particularly good, either. I’m sure I could do as well with Portra 800. A few I took in natural light do have that 70s movie look to them, but considering this film stock costs twice as much as anything else I use, I’d rather shoot slides for the price. Or just shoot Portra for high speed. I guess it was the sort of thing you might try once, but not something I expect to do regularly from here on out.1
From what I read, you’re supposed to take a picture of a gas station first 2. So, here we go:
I also took some shots of a band that plays on a trailor in the parking lot behind the ice cream place. Somebody Guitar Somebody… dude has guitar in his name so he must be good at guitar, right? Been stoking the Duane look pretty hard, too. God bless ’em for finding a way to gig, even if they have to drag the stage and bubble machine along with them. They had a dozen happy people watching them, and one obnoxious narcissistic girl who kept trying to pretend she was playing the bass and begging her boyfriend to take insta toks, so everyone would look at her. That’s what a fun band is supposed to do.
And a couple of daylight shots, just to see what colors I could pull out with the light streaming in the window.
That’s what she said
Actually, the In-n-Out was first, but we’re splitting hairs here
