Tilt Shift Tests

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?

Fuji Film Samples and a Rainbow

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.