An hour ago:
The Moon Tonight
on on 
Macro Flowers
on A teeny, tiny, 1cm across flower appeared in the yard. I’m sure glad I seeded with pounds of wildflower seeds now!1 The sun was well below the horizon, but I have a Tokina 100mm macro lens on the Z6 so I thought I’d try to get some shots with flash. I’m using my 15 year old SB-800 as commander and a newer SB-700 I got a few years ago. I could do way better if I planned it, and maybe I’ll try again over the weekend. Pop a reflector up to fill in the shadows with softer light, use a tripod for the camera, and all that.
After I got a couple from my field of wildflowers then went to the weeds growing through cracks in the driveway. These are the prettiest damned weeds you ever saw2, with amazingly vibrant red flowers that only bloom at night. They were just beginning to open, and I didn’t get them the real color because the direct light is too reflective and makes the image too contrasty and it fools the camera’s meter. But now that I know how this macro stuff works I can get the softbox/reflectors set, overexpose a bit, and get better shots of them even though they’re not open until it’s almost dark.
These were all taken handheld with the SB700 just laying on its side on the ground near the flower. I focused by leaning in and out (the Tokina doesn’t autofocus on the FTZ) and the results were fun. I rigged this for scanning negatives, but now I think I need to take pictures of bugs or coffee beans or something artsy fartsy3 like that.
Enough yammering. Behold!
1. You may recall, I sowed a couple of 1lb bags of wildflower seeds in the yard. This year’s crop was in an area about 10×35 in the middle of the yard and a 5 foot wide swath along the walkway. The wildflowers were coming up this spring and, just before they flowered, the gophers ate all of them. Right now, this purple thing isn’t my only flower. I actually have one lonely poppy bush that’s flowering in the middle of the yard. Several came up after we mowed the weeds flat and the gophers went back to work. Two made it to the point where they flowered, but one was eaten almost immediately after it bloomed. For some reason, this one poppy in the middle of the yard has been popping off blooms for a week and the gophers haven’t found it yet.
2. These must have escaped from the whackjob’s garden five years ago, but the last two or three years they’ve come up through the driveway joints and grown into shrubberies as large as five feet tall with scores of flowers each. All volunteers. I’ve never planted anything so hardy on purpose.
3. Coffee beans are artsy. Maybe I get a can if kidney beans for fartsy.
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!:
Street Photography with Ilford FP4
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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!
portra 400 tests
on 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!
New Velvia plus a few random Z6 images
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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.
Behold!
Super blood flower pink something something…
on 
Why do they keep adding names to the moon? I think super flower blood moon or some shit was what I read on the first site the quack quack go gave me when I was searching to find the time. It was an eclipse. There, that’s plenty clear. Good enough for coding java, good enough to describe a shadow on the moon.
But, alas, it’s not good enough to convince the unseasonably tropical cloudiness to stay at bay. So I got up at 3AM and shot some pics, through a high haze and the gaps in the high cumulus, which never seemed to be completely clear of the moon. As it got closer to the horizon the haze got worse, to the point where I had to add a stop and a half to get the moon even close to exposed. I gave up just after totality as it would go 5 minutes without being visible.
And, yet, the Z6 was able to pull a few usable, if not sharp or particularly good, images. Modern cameras are pretty amazing.
Behold!
Here’s what I was contending with, weatherwise:
Ilford FP4 and Ektar
on 
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.
Cinestill 800 Tests
on 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
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?
