SDN Photo-a-Day (Rules updates - read the OP)

[Darth Nostril]

Some random pics





When dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I like the technical quality of the first pic for some reason, though none of them are, well, good per se.

As soon as I get a consistantly working net connection and a way to resize pics ithout installing anything, i'll see about uploading some pics from here, with my repaired (in mid trip, the shutter died on my second day in NY!) camera and it's 2 new and AWESOME lenses. Suck it!

[Phantasee]

I think the dinosaur picture is cute. If I disconnect part of my brain I almost believe it's real.

[Akkleptos]

also random:


Ruined shack or just debris, forest backdrop.



Trees.



A kiosk.


Please excuse the bad quality of the first two... old mobile phone pics. I just couldn't miss the opportunity, and I thought the view was beautiful. (Not to say the last one was any better, but at least it was taken with a camera you couldn't call someone with).

[Simplicius]

Just a few quick edits; I have a lot of photos to deal with, and a lot of work in post. I'm so close to just telling my scanner to fuck off and getting them professionally done, because I'm tired of its auto settings fucking with my scans.


Boxcar. Fuji Superia 200. In-camera metering, which proved to be totally worthwhile.

(Shouldn't be so harsh; might be my damn scanner's fault.)


"Tex." Fuji Superia 200. 1/250 @ f/3.5


Boathouse. Fuji Reala 100. 1/100 @ f/11 or something like that. This is a 6x7 shot from the Konica, which as you can see gives awesome image quality and a correspondingly awesome problem with dust when scanning.

[Bounty]

I went to see the Royal Museum for Central Africa and took the opportunity to finish off a few rolls of film.



Sooo much symbolism in this image. The exhibitions did a great job of blending African history, natural sciences and the shit the colonials did.





Low light + no flash = thank god for manual overrides with the indoors shots.

[Simplicius]

What camera and film? You've got a great turn-of-the-(last)-century look with the second and third photos. Crop out the border of the case on the second one and you've got a perfect tableau "from the early days of photography;" nature red in tooth and claw and all that. If the case hadn't been in the frame, it would have been perfect as-is.



The first one as-is is in pretty rough shape, what with the flatness and the immense grain. PDN doesn't have a noise reduction filter that I know of, so I couldn't try anything to bring it up to date. However, a little playing around with a semi-opaque layer and the Soften portrait effect gives us:



Hey, now it's 1845 and you're shooting calotypes!

[Bounty]

Olympus 35RC on manual with slightly dodgy Kodak B&W (€3.99 for a six-pack!). I have doubles with the digital of most of the shots but you're right, the film ones have that nice antique feel - though I have to stress that most of it is due to the museum, which has done a terrific job of putting up-to-date exhibits in an original fin-de-siècle presentation. The cabinets and tableaus looked virtually untouched from the day the museum opened a hundred years ago.

I have a second batch of shots from the park around the museum which should be developed by the middle of next week. They were taken outside and while it was close (ISO 400 on a *very* bright day in direct sunlight) the meter would just about let me shoot at f/22 and 1/500. Those should be pretty interesting.

[J]

The support towers on a railway bridge, it's showing some signs of its age. The original was shot in colour, then converted to B&W using the channel mixer tool in Photoshop.





I was trying to get this one at the right angle so it would look like a heart, this was the best of several shots. As with the first picture, it started its life in colour then made its way through Photoshop.

[Bounty]

More from the museum grounds:

[Bounty]

I'm posting this not because it's a particularly good shot, but I just love the way the colours came out.

[MKSheppard]

National museum of the US Navy

New Cold War Gallery finally getting close to completion -- stitched together from 3 shots.

[phongn]

I have a Canonet. It's mighty fun. (1/15th @ f1.7, Kodak 100UC, developed and scanned by a local drugstore minilab.)

[Bounty]

I have a Canonet. It's mighty fun. (1/15th @ f1.7, Kodak 100UC, developed and scanned by a local drugstore minilab.)

That's with a tripod, I presume?

[phongn]

That's with a tripod, I presume?

All handheld. My technique could stand some improvement but the lack of mirror slap really helps.

[Bounty]

That's with a tripod, I presume?

All handheld. My technique could stand some improvement but the lack of mirror slap really helps.

That's very nice work then I'm working on my technique, care to share some pointers? Usually I use the "exhale, press at the end", and that gets me decent pictures up to 1/25th on the digital. With mechanical cameras I try to stay at 1/50 or over; below that the shutter causes too much jitter.

Then again, I've only used the Kiev for practice, and that has a pretty hefty metal shutter.

[phongn]

Press slowly and evenly - something like a soft release might help (I've been meaning to get one - forgot when I was in NYC!). I also try to depress with a finger joint rather than the end of my finger in one even action.

From what I've heard from people who've fired weapons, one evenly pulls, not grasps at the trigger. Perhaps something similar for the shutter release on a camera?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

From what I've heard from people who've fired weapons, one evenly pulls, not grasps at the trigger. Perhaps something similar for the shutter release on a camera?

This is absolutely correct. An even pull at the far back of the first pad or the first joint of your trigger finger gives you the most control and the greatest leverage. This gives you the most smoothness possible. Whenever I get around to it, I ought to break out my old Canonet and try it.

Until then. Cellphone camera picture. Yes, it's a cellphone camera, yes I have much better cameras, but I don't always have them with me.

[Simplicius]

I have a Canonet. It's mighty fun. (1/15th @ f1.7, Kodak 100UC, developed and scanned by a local drugstore minilab.)

How do you rate third-party scanning? Did you have to do much touching-up, or were the scans faithful to what you saw?

[Bounty]

Flowers. Pretty flowers! Zorki, f/16, 1/200.

[phongn]

How do you rate third-party scanning? Did you have to do much touching-up, or were the scans faithful to what you saw?

I didn't get any prints, though it seemed reasonably faithful to what I remember seeing. The local minilab fucked up and scratched some negatives and wrecked a couple frames, though I have considered getting a negative scanner and doing it myself, but that's quite a bit of money for something I just might not end up doing much of.

[phongn]

CVS - at least the one near my place - processed the film well, but their scanning was atrocious - there's roller lines on every image! Worse, they're rather low resolution images (Wallgreens provided rather higher res ones but their processing seemed a bit iffy).

That said, I do think everything turned out quite nice, and Fuji Reala 100 seems a rather nice film - really should do a more careful comparison of it with my 100UC shots. 400UC is on the list for playing with (plus my rolls of oh-so-lovely Tri-X 400...)

EDIT: Finally, while I do like the Canonet's handling, the lens is not all that spectacular. It was a consumer camera, after all, and it's been quite awhile since I've seen five-bladed shutters, making for, uh, rather interesting bokeh

[Simplicius]

There are some respectable scanners that aren't particularly expensive, and as long as you are only scanning for preview or web display a flatbed should be all right. I have a Canon 8800F which is just above the bottom tier of film-capable flatbeds (in that is can handle 120 as well as 35mm). It cost me less than $200 (I want to say $170 or so) from Amazon. For that price it is decent - 4800 ppi optical resolution, very little warm-up time, and fast scans - but it has a couple of strikes against it as far as serious use is concerned, in my opinion. First, it lacks Digital ICE (unlike the Epson line of flatbeds), and this has given me major headaches trying to keep dust away from the platen, the negatives, and the upper sensor window. It's a frankly impossible task. Second, the native scanner driver has problems auto-correcting for color negatives and auto-recognizing frames, and there is no option to disable either of these features. Sure, you can scan color negatives as color slides, but that gives frame recognition a headache. This has given me a headache trying to deal with incorrect color balance on an unacceptably high number of frames. I haven't researched third-party scanning software, but I would seek out a better scanner first.

If you do look at flatbeds, I would bypass Canon and look at Epson. They offer higher-end flatbeds with apparently greater capability, and still for less than $1000. (And god damn, the V750 can even handle large-format!) I think self-scanning is definitely worth considering, though, since it knocks off 2/3 the cost of film processing, and for personal use it doesn't add much time to ordinary post-processing. It's only when you've got a huge backlog that it becomes irritating. (I would still use a professional service if I was scanning or printing for presentation, though.)

[phongn]

Apparently at Costco, you can have them trick the machines to scan at full resolution (by having them set a print target size but not actually printing). Unfortunately, the closest ones to me are a decent little drive away.

I'm currently considering an Epson V500 ... the V700 looks very nice, but rather too expensive. And then there are the dedicated film scanners ...

[Simplicius]

I have been productive recently: I am nearly done with my roll of Provia VC, I have test-fired about a third of my roll of 35mm Ektar, and I just finished reading Ansel Adams's Examples, which I recommend to absolutely anyone who is at all interested in the craft of photography. I also have a notion for a photographic survey of farmhouses, but I am not sure whether I would rather use the Rolleicord or the Speed Graphic.

In the meantime, some recent digital snaps:



A wild turkey whose antipathy turned to curiosity once I started taking photographs.



Stairwell with Bread, 2009