Not much to say. These are only posted to share with a friend.
For context, I have a wild hair to get a good shot of the train on film. Tested it with digital to see if I liked the angle, but the light died on me before I got anything really good that day. The awkward angle on the shots across the water from the bushes were because I literally just spun the camera around on the tripod, which was at my knees, and took a few shots while waiting for the northbound train to arrive. That one wasn’t a winner, so I didn’t get the good film shot either as the clouds had blocked the golden hour by the time it arrived. I’ll have to try again.
I’ll get a good shot one day. Takes a little planning, though, as it necessitates hauling 30 pounds of camera gear and tripods a half mile to get to that spot.
The second sunset was this afternoon. The wind was blowing so no reflections, but it was a lovely evening to be outside and watch the clouds change color, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
This will be a big picture dump. Mostly so I can share with a friend. I’ve shot some more film, and some of it on 135. I’m using an F6, which should be far more foolproof than my Fuji. And just about any film camera ever made, for that matter. My goal in getting it was to do experiments like bracketing exposure that are expensive in medium format, or taking more dynamic shots that are kind of difficult with a 12 pound beast on a tripod. The camera writes exif data, so I can work faster and match up exposure data when the scans come back.
The F6 I just set the exposure compensation up 2/3 of a stop. The Ektar I shot with the 680 I fudged up to the next stop
My first two rolls were Kodak. First Portra 400, then Ektar. I wasn’t completely happy with what came back. While technically correct, even shots taken using Program Auto were still a little dark, the Ektar was kind of red with lost details in the shadows, and the Portra seems a little grainy.
That second reminded me of something. I have a new method based on what I read on someone’s site — I don’t even remember where I read it — but the writer said that he was shooting portra up 2/3 of a stop if it was meant to be scanned. Like, he’d shoot Portra 160 at iso 100, but not push the film at all. So the most recent roll of Portra 400 I ran through the F6 I just set the exposure compensation up 2/3 of a stop. The Ektar I shot with the 680 I fudged up to the next stop, since that camera only works in whole stops. When I bracketed, I wanted to see the exp on the dark shot and a + with the angry beeping on the light shot. In fact, I’m not convinced that for anything with more than 4 stops of range, if I don’t get the overexposed warning I might consider another shot at one stop longer exposure time.
I’m happier with what I got back this time. Both the medium format Ektar and the Portra 400 in the F6. If I stumble across that website again I’ll have to drop a thanks to the author for that suggestion, assuming it wasn’t written 15 years ago.
Enough writing. Here are some photos.
Portra 400 from the first roll in the F6:
And the first roll of Ektar. The bird and surfer shots are all hand held, so while the pelican is a little soft and underexposed, getting sharp enough to see him taking a shit at 500mm, offhand, with no monopod or tripod, I am going to count as a win.
I needed some magic from the photo shops to bring up the shadows in the photos along the bluffs, and they’re very red. Strangely, pointing straight into the sun works better, the sunset shots are almost exactly what came back from the lab.
For contrast, here are a few shots from my third roll in the F6. For most of this roll I had the camera set with +2/3 exposure compensation. And, yes, they’re very random. I had no goal in mind other than burning a roll of film to see if the exposure compensation worked.
More exposure seems to mean less grain there. Important with the higher speed film, and it’s pretty hard to blow a highlight with these negative films, so I’ll fudge up from now on.
Here’s the roll of Ektar. I was playing with filters as well as bracketing. Even 1.3 stops over exposed (from the meter reading) I like it better than shooting at what the meter tells me.
This next gallery wasn’t here when I originally posted as I didn’t get the film back until after I made the post. But nobody reads this blog so I’ll add it here to make for an easy reference since it’s the same scenes.
Portra 800, shot at the same time as the Ektar above. I metered at 640, then fudged up, so everything would be at least a quarter stop over, but as much as a stop and a third over. Most of these shots the camera was beeping and flashing +, so it thought I was overexposed. The first three have very little editing, the bottom two I pulled the highlights back, but they were more than 5 and 6 EV over the reeds. The fact that I was able to compress the dynamic range enough to get it all printable means I’m on the right track with my shoot 2/3 stop over method.
I spent some time in December gathering film in abundance in an attempt to get a full view of the 120 negative landscape. This began with blurry pictures of surfers and the thought that a faster film might buy me a couple of stops to get sharper waves and moving things. Maybe the significantly larger negatives might mitigate some of the grain issues I remember from my 35mm film days a quarter century back and I don’t always need the very finest grain, regardless.
There really aren’t a lot of options these days. From what I have seen of pictures on the internets posted by fellow photographic luddites, each film has its own qualities. And what most intrigues me is that Portra 400 and Portra 800 seem to be different than the Portra 160 I have already tried. The only film stock I didn’t much care for in the samples I’ve perused was the Fuji 400H, which seems even worse with shadows than the Kodak offerings I’ve tried, but I have been interested in the Fuji Pro 160NS. It isn’t imported to the US market, but a few people seem to be getting cases and reselling them on ebay. Luckily, I found one seller right here in town and got a 5 pack from him.
So, my experimental films:
Ektar 100
Portra 160
Portra 400
Portra 800
Fuji Pro 160 NS
Alas, I only have two backs, so I wasn’t able to really do apples to apples with all of them. And film and processing is so damned expensive I am not going to waste film on nothing but experiments, so I just kept a different film in each back and when I had time and the light looked interesting I went out to shoot.
For apples to apples, I got Ektar and Portra 160
Portra 800 and Ektar
Portra 400 and Fuji Pro 160NS
When I say Apples to Apples, the Portra 400 and Fuji are a little farther off than the other two. Both were loaded in the field as I ran out other stock and the images were captured more than a few minutes apart, so it was a little darker when the Fuji was shot. But the other comparisons were back to back1 and as close to the same exposure as I can get.
I uploaded a couple of shots super large. All I did was make them 90% jpeg so the file size is manageable, no color correction or sharpening. The idea was is get an idea of just how grainy the films are. Right click and view image for the monster sized version.
Portra 800 — fast enough the birds are sharpFuji Pro 160NSPortra 400Ektar 100
I have my favorites so far. Not going to say which ones, or why, but I have an idea now of what I might try in different situations. And I know the 800 is definitely grainier, and noticeably so, but not to the point of distraction. I might have to try to get some surfers after all.
I have been editing the crap out of some of these scans just to see what I can get. And have been experimenting with filters, though my filter holder is too small for the 50mm lens. I have to hold a filter in front of the camera while opening the shutter, and then hope the scan doesn’t come back with my fingers in the frame. My 100mm lens has relatively petite 82mm filter threads, so I have experimented there with success, but the wider lenses are 95mm and 112mm threads.
This isn’t the real problem, though. The real issue I had with many of these exposures is a byproduct of how reflective the water is near the reeds in the Bataquitos lagoon. There, the sky was only a stop or a stop and a half above the reflections in the water, but my reverse GNDs are 2 or 3 stop, and my hard GNDs are 2 and 2.5 stops.
In this case, if I want to get the reeds in the middle exposed with any detail the sky is 4 stops up and the water is 2.5 stops up. Using a 1 or 2 stop soft GND the border darkened the reeds and not the water in front of them. Using a hard GND at 2 stops brought the sky down to the same or even below the water. I tried using a soft 1 stop flipped upside down, which worked great to tame the sky, but that’s a cheap Formatt Hitech filter and it has a magenta cast so the sky ends up redder than the water. Every solution is suboptimal.
I need to ruminate on this, but it seems like a 1 stop hard or medium might come in handy. Or I could stop being an idiot2 and trying to tame an overly contrasty scene. I’ve been reticent to get one because 130mm filters are stupid expensive, but I could still hold a cheaper 100mm with my fingers, and I could use it with my 100mm holder on the tiny little baby Nikon cameras that only have 77mm threads as well.
Enough ruminating. I’m just going to post edited images now by film type.
Fuji Pro 160NS
Portra 400
Portra 800
Portra 160
Ektar 100
The first Ektar shot shows the value of a real holder, an easy horizon, and an appropriate filter. There’s 2.5 stops of reverse GND on that sunset and the clouds in the other shot (not posted) that don’t have the filter lack detail while the foreground is very dark. That’s an 8 second exposure a bit after the sun was down and I exposed for the grey bridge support on the shady side. Those cacti are a darned good substitute for middle grey and they were down maybe 1/2 of a stop as I have learned to fudge up, not down, when shooting Ektar. The others were just frustrating, either the sky was too bright, too dark, or had a magenta shift from that crappy filter and all the post editing to get the exposure balanced top to bottom doesn’t make the reflections the same color as the sky.
I took some digital shots while I was at these sites as well. I’ve posted the ones from the late sunset over the bridge, but I don’t think I shared the ones from the bird sanctuary. Taken after the film was gone as the sky just didn’t want to give up.
1. Literally. I took a photograph, swapped on a different film back, adjusted to get as close as possible to the same exposure, then took the other photograph. I can’t always get perfect exposure parity as ISO 160 is only 2/3 of a stop faster than 100 while the camera only adjusts in whole stops.
There was a substantial swell over the weekend. Head high waves with way bigger in some sets. It seemed like every surfer in Southern California was trying to get a piece of it. I knew the tide was high at 1PM, so I headed down a little after, and as I was driving down the coast highway there were absolute rocking monsters throwing spray off of every jetty.
Except, the tide was lower than I expected. Because high tide was two hours before. I looked at the tide tables, saw 11, and my pea brain registered 1. Dammit!
Oh well. Stopped at the first open spot, which was next to the cold water jetty, so I climbed out on the rocks until I was almost getting sprayed by the bigger waves and started playing with the gear.
I first used the time to work out my video tripod with the 300-500 lens. Alas, I took 30-40 minutes getting set up, learning how to make the tripod move properly, then learning how to make the VR1 on the camera work properly for what I was trying to do. By the time I got around to still photos the tide had ebbed too far and the waves were significantly smaller and choppier, losing their grandeur. They had so much power when I first arrived, it was disappointing to not get them a their largest.2 That’s what I get for misreading my tide chart. I still enjoyed the afternoon very much.
The surf, and the linup:
North of the Jetty. Before I sorted it I was using too slow a shutter speed and having focus issues. I later bumped the ISO and changed focus to wide area S and continuous and got much sharper results. Here’s the first burst I tried:
There was a guy on a standup catching some monsters north of the Jetty, and when I was first there a couple of folks were making the right as well as the left. But by the time I was done futzing with gear everything was farther north, left, and running behind the north jetty rocks.
South of the jetty was into the sun, so the light wasn’t as good. And the waves there weren’t as steep and were getting smaller as the tide ebbed. But it was less crowded and there were a few pretty good surfers there trying to avoid the mobs to the north and at Terramar.
Basically, I shoulda got there earlier. Next time I’ll have my camera set up right, and I have the tripod tuned now, so taking video will go more smoothly as well, if I feel the desire. Another swell mid week and over the weekend, with higher tides later in the day, so maybe I’ll get to try again.
I ended the day over the lagoon watching the sunset. Since I had the ginormous lens on, I gave it a go. Nothing extra special here, just playing with exposures.
1. Vibration Reductions. Nikon’s brand of in-lens image stabilization.
Note to self: For video go with Internal Stabilization OFF, lens VR ON, Sport mode. This seems to smooth out the minor jumblies, but doesn’t introduce weird artifacts or cause strange lags when trying to pan the camera.
This isn’t some introspective blog post or anything. You might get that from the title, but that’s not what it means. I literally was taking pictures of reflections a couple days ago, and then this afternoon at sunset.
The tide has been very low right at sunset this last week, and a low, ebbing tide tends to expose these shallow waves and wet sand flats that reflect the clouds. A couple days ago on my walk the clouds came out a wonderful stripey pattern that made blue and pink in the waves, and today it looked like it might do it again, but we ended up with nothing but cirrus. Still worth it, and I wasn’t the only one there to witness it. Hundreds of people lining the blufftops from the village to south of Terramar, where I decided to watch it myself.
First, the sunset from two days ago. I took a bunch, all handheld, at different exposures, to see what I would get. The tide had ebbed by this moment, and was beginning to turn, so it was a fun game of walking out to the waterline for a shot, then having to scramble back up when a wave came in. Like an enormous sandpiper.
Behold:
Today’s was far less colorful. And, frankly, I got there late. Probably had a lot of really good golden reflections half an hour earlier, but even the more sedate light was beautiful in person. Just far less spectacular than the clouds above. I’ll post them anyway, because it’s 2021 and these are the first photos of the year. Frankly, 2020 can just fuck right off. Good riddance.
My favorites are the single man standing in the reflections. The somehow reflect the mood of the season.
It never quite went off tonight. The clouds were perfectly set, but too much scud rolled in before the sun got below the clouds. I was worried about that, so I went to my spot underneath the bridge, hoping the extra mile inland would help. At first it looked like it was going to be great, as you can see in the first photo. But it wasn’t enough. The clouds kept rolling in and. I held hope as the sky started going light and for about a minute there was a lovely reflection and some lit clouds, but then the vibrancy died off and it was just a spot of glow and grey.
Alas, at the same time, the east was lit up with spectacular pink and purple. But, being beneath the bridge with all the water to the west of me, that did me no good. The last photo is what’s behind me at this spot, a bridge, a freeway offramp, and some bushes. Far less dramatic than still, reflecting waters.
Might have been a good night to take this lagoon from the other direction. I should scout the overlooks up the road. I’ve avoided them because the background is a mall and a wal mart, but maybe there’s some creative framing to be done for evenings like this.
Lots of clouds, lots of wind. Offshore wind, though, which is very strange with these clouds. I never got the perfect light I was looking for, with some clouds and smoke obscuring the horizon, but a half hour after sunset taking 15-30 second exposures was kind of interesting.
I’ll just dump them all here. They should be in chronological order.
Just a few shots I took looking for challenging metering. I pretty much lost half of each roll doing this, but I think I am learning some. Taken over the course of a week in Early December. I’ll just leave them here without further comment.
This afternoon there was a lovely, broken, high cirrus with no scud on the horizon and little possibility of the marine layer blocking a glorious lighting of the high clouds. It was going to be a perfect sunset for photography.
I put the ultrawide on the film camera, and camped on a spot where I saw several strings of pelicans flying by at low altitude, and where I expected plenty of options for subjects beneath the spectacular glow. Then I watched the sky as the clouds dissipated, leaving me with nothing above the horizon. Instead of a firmament of ping, purple, and yellow I got mostly blue, with the only color being right where the sun hit the horizon. And the pelicans never again flew past. That’ll teach me to get excited for the weather.
At least I had the digital with a 24-70 lens, so I spent some of the time experimenting with powerful backlighting. The tide was extremely low and the breeze was out of the north. Plenty of seagulls were using the jetties for lift, at some moments congregating in groups a dozen strong, and I got a few cormorants heading north for variety. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but at least it was a fun way to spend an hour outside on a chilly evening.
I dumped a smattering of the images to jpeg and I’ll just leave them here.
I have been burning through some film stock, trying to see what’s what in negative film. The recent tests have been on Portra 160, Ektar, and PanF 50.
I originally thought to just try one black and white and one color film, and chose Ektar and Ilford XP2 to start with. The Ilford was chosen at random as a 400 speed black and white that has been around forever, so I figured it was a standard. The Ektar because I saw some great landscape images on the website of a photographer I like1. Both are reputed to be forgiving, so I got a box of each.
But I ended up with a large variety before I even shot my first frame. The gentleman I bought the camera from said he’d toss in a “couple rolls of film to get me started,” which I thought was awesome. But his definition of “couple” was quite expansive. He actually gave me a two boxes of Portra 160 as well as a bunch of Ilford black and white including PanF 50, Delta 100, and Delta 3200. Quite a variety!
Ektar is supposedly the more saturated negative film, and I’d thought to do some saturated landscapes when I decided to try film. The first rolls I shot that came out showed that it is, in fact, super saturated. Enough that skin tones get a little ruddy and golden sunlight gets a touch of red in it. The roll I got back today, however, was shot into a sunset with wild colors reflecting on calm water and it was beautiful.
This shot was the last frame of Ektar I had — I took three shots, the other two as lovely but I like the ducks in this one. I shot Portra before this for comparison, and was about ready to pack up and head back to the truck, but this was a sunset that never wanted to give up and a few minutes after I ran out of Ektar every cloud lit up an amazing pink, and even the ones overhead were reflected on the still water in front of me, so I slapped on the back with Portra 160 and gave it a go.
In all cases I knew the reeds in the middle were going to go black. The sky and the water only had a stop or two difference, but the reeds were several stops down, so I metered for the water and let the sky take care of itself. From what I’ve sussed about these films, you can go down a stop or two then it gets noisy, then black. You can go up way more and the highlights won’t run out of information even if they’re four stops over.
Well, the Portra definitely fits that bill. It’s amazeballs, and even the reeds in the foreground, which are down two stops, show the weird pink glow everything had in real life. The second shot is a four or eight second exposure3 and I can’t tell you how happy I am it came out like this.
Another roll of Portra had some night shots I’d done the week after Thanksgiving, including shots of Baba. The less saturated colors are even more pleasing than the slightly over-the-top Ektar shot of the same scene, and the dynamic range is beyond impressive.
Baba Coffee — shot on Portra 160Baba Coffee — shot on Ektar 100
The same shot in Ektar is also lovely, but I’m a fan of the Portra. The colors are spot on, and the dynamic range is even better than the Ektar, which already handles the lit sign better than digital by far. Note how much more influence the streetlamp has on the color cast on Ektar as well, coming up a little green, but also note how much extra blue it adds to the sign and the umbrellas.
Even though I metered the same way, the Portra shot might be slightly more exposed. It is 160 speed film, compared to Ektar’s 100 speed, and having come only a few minutes later in the evening I’m guessing it wasn’t a whole stop darker even though I corrected up a full stop, but the highlights are still beautifully handled. The information in the dark areas is lovely, too, and you can tell the building above is a deep ruddy brown.
As for the PanF 50, I don’t know what to make of it. Every single image I took the camera barked at me4, even when I thought I was doubling the meter reading. I’ve learned two things here, first that PanF has a lot of reciprocity failure and needs quite a bit more than the meter says, and second, that the Fuji really doesn’t measure well at ASA50 so sometimes you just have to let it beep at you and tell it to suck your balls. Both of these shots were called underexposed and, though not exactly perfect, were not so dark I’d expect them to be more than two stops down.
I also took some experimental artsy5 shots of some bridge pilings where I had deep shadows and brightly lit concrete. All three had the camera beeping and flashing lights like a pissed off R2D2, yet I’m not convinced that they are too dark. The darkest one is underexposed, sure. But at very least least the brightest one has to be within two stops of adequate, regardless of the disapproving minus sign.
That said, I printed out a reciprocity chart for Ilford films and tossed a copy in each of my camera and gear bags. 50 speed film is slow even in full daylight, and the failure on these black and whites is way more than I realized. 4 seconds on the meter translates to over 7 seconds in the real world, and it gets worse from there so this stuff isn’t just meter for the shadows. It’s meter for the shadows then double it.
This was a fun bunch of data. Not in the least because I am still very uncertain about how to meter for a lot of situations and having a few frames come back nice, not just recoverable, is quite a relief.
The next batch will be both better and worse. I tried some crazy long exposures, which I’m almost certain won’t be good but will give me data on how far off my assumptions are. And I shot some tonight that included a spectacular sky and some pretty reasonable subjects, so I’m confident the incident metering in conjunction with Portra’s dynamic range should give me a usable shot or two.
1. alexburkephoto.com — I don’t know the cat, he just posts beautiful landscapes and explains things like metering and filters in a way that I find very easy to understand.
2. After carefully exposing several shots, bracketing the meter, and recording my settings for test purposes, I pulled this roll out of the camera and dropped it, at which point it sprung open and ruined the whole roll. I now keep a rubber band in my pocket to put on exposed film and keep it from unrolling, just in case.
3. It was very dark and I had put my notepad away already, so I don’t remember exactly. Which is foolish, as the whole reason for this was to test film and practice exposure in challenging conditions.
4. Being state of the art in 1997, this camera does metering through the lens. But only while you’re taking the picture, not before hand. If it doesn’t think it got enough light, or got too much light, during your exposure it will beep annoyingly and flash all the LCD screens in a fit of disapproval. Strangely, it makes it extra satisfying when it doesn’t beep and the “EXP” is shown on the screen instead of the flashing lights and a + or – sign showing that you over or underexposed that last shot.
5. This just means they’re crap shots. But if you act like they’re great art filled with hidden meaning and anyone who doesn’t understand them just doesn’t get it, maybe you’re avant-garde.
