Muting Contrast and a Stolen Shot

For fun, I wanted to test my theory that the tobacco mutes contrast. Inford PANF 50 ISO is a highly contrasty film, so it's a great test for muting contrast. The first shots are the clearest example of how the filter works.

1/60th, f3.5, tobacco filter


1/60th, f8, no filter
Notice, also, that the first image has a darker sky. The tobacco filter is basically green and red. The red aspect results in the sky darkening. The green aspect means that green hues are lighter. This means that blues and some yellows will be darker. The net result is flatness. Look at the shadows on the statue's cap brim. Also the buttons of the shirt and the folds. The non-filtered image presents substantially more contrast with deeper shadows and more depth.


1/160th, f3.5
Money may not grow on trees, but cans do. And at about a nickel a pop for the CRV, that's some money.


And let's end here today. I snagged this shot while some pros were flipping through their camera's digital images and their model took a moment's pause. Not all digital advances are for the best. None of them managed to get this shot.

Capital Building and Statues

I feel like I'm gypping you not breaking this into three posts. After work on Tuesday I sent to the Civic Center neighborhood. Why? To see how long I could be there without being stabbed. Answer: Six minutes. While there, I decided to grab some photos and, conveniently, the newest soon-to-be LEED Platinum building in San Francisco, the Public Utilities Commission building, was there to be photographed. It finished construction recently or is about to finish, so I decided to grab some shots of this pretty nifty building.


1/80, f8. Here you can see this building's most prominent feature -- the side-mounted windmills. The building's shape directs wind into the turbines, amplifying the natural air movement's effect. Pretty nifty, but I imagine those must make the view out of those windows somewhat limiting.


1/50th, f8. The windmills close-up.


1/125th, f5.6. An artsy-type shot from down below.

In addition to the new SFPUC building, I decided to grab some shots of the city hall and a couple nearby statues.


1/100th, f22. San Francisco's City Hall. Sunset. Lovely building.


1/125th, f16. Some city building. I saw the name of it and decided to remember it instead of writing it down. Then I forgot the name of it.


1/160th, f4.5. As you've probably guessed, I love photographing buildings. And the SF Public Library at Civic Center is a great building. This was shot almost wide-open (at 120mm, wide-open is f4.6). And on 400 ISO film. Nikon makes great gear. The N70 matches the 24-120 very well. This is helped by the fact that this is a fantastic lens. Of my Nikon lenses, it's probably the best.

We'll wrap up today with some shots of the statues around City Hall.


1/80, f11.


1/100th, f4.5


1/125th, f5.6


1/125th, f5. Ashurbanipal upskirt. Actually, this is a well thought and place statue.
Here, Ashurbanipal faces the library (he founded one, but not the San Francisco library, obviously) and stands out front of the Asian Art Museum.

Bad Weather, Bad Waves, Great Splashes

Last Tuesday saw some rain and a good deal of wave energy within the bay. As I walked up the Embarcadero, the waves on the rocks and along the piers broke upward with










A sea lion statue by AT&T Park.


A reflection of the Ferry Building. I'd hoped it to be a clean reflection with a couple ripples. It didn't turn out that way.


1/8th exposure, luckily timed so that the trolley began moving late in the exposure, making only part of it blurry.

Developing Problems and Bad Photos

I'll only share a couple photos today. For some reason, this TMax 400 roll did not develop well. Two major problems plague the result: surge lines and incomplete fixing. I developed this exactly as I always develop 400 ISO film and, in an effort to prevent surge marks (a few rolls this year have has minor and limited surging), I agitated the two rolls in this tank very slowly. Still, these are the worst surge lines I've ever seen.

Surge lines occur on film when the agitation is too quick. The developer moves over the film at different speeds. During development, developing chemicals read the film surface through the perforation holes as well as through the gaps in the loading spiral. So, for some reason, this roll developed surge lines. The other roll did not.

Also, this roll came our purple when finished. Even though this was fixed for seven minutes, the fix did not clear all the film surface off the negatives. The purple tint made the negatives slightly less contrasty and, in a few years, the images will be completely muddy. To fix this, I could re-fix it in another, longer fix bath. However, that would not correct the surge lines, so I don't see any reason to bother.


1/30th, f5.6. Taken from one angle, the hand appears to be giving the ball to someone.


1/50th, f5.6. Taken from a different angle, it appears to be mid-pitch.


1/640th, f4. These are the surge lines I mentioned. They were less evident in the above photos because of the light background.


1/800th, f4.

So, today's lesson: even gentle agitation can leave surge lines. To prevent this, I'll need to agitate even more slowly in the future. Also, TMax requires a much longer fixing time than other films. So future rolls will go back to a ten-minute fixing bath with three sets of rotations. This fixing bath was seven minutes with two rotations (one minute at the outset and then 30 seconds halfway through.)

In sum, very disappointing results from last Monday.

Designs on Architecture

One of my 2012 goals is to determine if I can hold my own photographing buildings. Architectural photography, done well, presents some of the most interesting and striking images around. I'm not into photographic trickery, like high-dynamic-range images and substantial levels of image retouching. As art, extensive retouching has its place. But photo editing also robs people of the ability to learn photographic fundamentals and can make people worse photographers. For some of these photos, though, I needed to use Photoshop to correct some gear deficiencies. For instance, I do not own a tilt or tilt-shift lens. To accommodate this absence in my gear case, I used Photoshop's perspective control function to keystone some of the building shots below. I'll note that as a percentage next to the image capture data.


1/60th, f5.6, 35%. In order to prevent the perspective control from cropping the building top, I increased the canvas size about 15% in each direction and then distorted the image. A small rotation correction, as much as allowable without subject loss. This corrected some unevenness amplified by the distortion process. Lesson learned: photograph straight-on.


1/60th, f5.6, 8%. Hotel Vitale. Also increased the red and yellow saturations about 15% or 10% and dropped the blue and cyan saturations about 35%.


1/125th at f3.5. Digital monochrome conversion. In order to make this image turn out properly -- the sky was much brighter than the bus, -- I metered the bus and held the exposure lock button until taking the above shot.


1/640th, f5.3. Also used a wand mask, feathered to 18, on the bird. Dropped the bird mask and increased the exposure on that layer. Then dropped the offset on the back layer minorly and flattened the image.


1/320th, f11.


1/50th, f5.3, 24%. Let's end this post big with an above average reflection capture.

So here are a few lessons from this outing:
1- For building shots, to minimize distortion during perspective control processing, stand far back.
2- Leave space around the subject within the frame to minimize subject loss following perspective correction.

Film Experiment: Cross Processing

Did you know that movie film is basically the same as still film with one difference: Movie film has an additional coating called remjet. Three fairly common films have this coating: Kodachrome, Seattle Film Works, and Photoworks. The latter two are movie film tailings -- lengths of film not needed during movie filming. The remjet doesn't affect film developing, but scanning the negatives is much harder because the coating darkens when it dries. So it needs to be removed in order to obtain the best negative results. For this week's Monday installment, I used a roll of Photoworks film and crossprocessed it as black and white. I've experimented with this before, twice, with varied results.

To complete the crossprocessing, the film needs a bleach bath to remove the remjet. I use a quart stainless steel bowl and about three ounces of bleach to the quart. This provides a slow remjet dissolve and prevents the bleach from destroying the negatives' images. Some of the results are below. The first result will be before the bleach treatment, the second afterward. You'll notice that before the bleach treatment the negatives were thicker, yielding poorer contrast and substantial negative noise. After, the negatives exhibit a roughness and some image flaws from bleach image erosion. However, they are substantially more contrasty with finer image quality and markedly less scanner noise. Also, both images of the same subject were post-processed the same way. Only two images, one of the dog images and the Pier 14 image, received any post-processing other than automatic contrast balancing.



I still don't get this sculpture, but it frames the buildings behind it well. 1/400th at f11. You can see in the second image where the bleach began to erode the negative along the top. When the bleach bath removes the remjet layer, it begins outward and moves in. The 35mm film's advance sprocket holes provide an edge next to the frame for the bleach to begin working on, so sometimes the remjet-removed images have a saw-tooth-like finish where the bleach had greater action than in the rest of the image.

Also note that the bleached image has greater highlight detail but some shadow detail loss. Also, the sky is nicely toned in the second image. Overall, I think the second image is more successful, though neither is superb. The framing is acceptable, but I should have underexposed the image a 1/3 stop to darken the highlights a bit.




For some reason this statue apparently causes some controversy. Some people seem to want it removed. It's Ghandi! So what if it's a nonsequitor at the Ferry Building. Guess what, the bow and arrow on the Embarcadero -- it's a bigger and far more prominent nonsequitor.
Anyway, this shot was taken at 1/2,000th and f4. I like the second image better, again, because it adds depth and detail to the sky, reveals shadow details and increases highlight details.




This picture needed some gamma correction to bring out shadows in the first, so to ensure proper comparison I dropped the gamma in the second. I think it was .45. 1/160th at f22.
The second provides improved dynamic range and less scanner noise. Also, on the first, you'll note the horizontal lines on the right. This was the sixth negative in the strip so the scanner interprets the end of a negative strip, when curled, as horizontal lines. These negatives could have used a longer wash, probably due to the remjet and the differences in how color film reacts to fixer. So even though I washed the negatives for about seven minutes, the still curled. After the bleach bath, which removed the last fixer, the negatives laid exceptionally flat and the scanner didn't add the horizontal lines.




I didn't track the shutter and aperture speeds for the dog pictures, but I did need a flash. This is why all my clean clothes have dog hair: when I put the laundry up to fold, the dogs decide to hide in it. The second image, after the bleach, has less scanner noise and better contrast.




This is the second picture that needed gamma correction. Hannah's nose was too close to the flash and was blown out as a huge highlight. Dropping the image gamma to .65 fixed that.

Overall, what was this post's point? That old Kodachrome, Seattle Film Works, and Photoworks film you have lying around is not unusable garbage. In fact, with creative processing, it can be used quite effectively and with good results. All three were very high-quality films and yield great monochrome tonal ranges, crisp detail, and nice results when handled well.

Next time I cross process some of the Seattle Film Works or Photoworks film in my fridge, I'll post a YouTube video showing how to do it.

Alameda Bayshore

The Nikon N70 is a lightweight, very user-friendly camera with a number of good features (though it notably lacks a few others.) It offers a number of great qualities: light weight (so it causes little or no neck fatigue), excellent metering (my copy routinely returns entire rolls with good histogram profiles), and a reasonably good autofocus feature (for those of you who use AF lenses -- you know who you are.)

The N70 is an AIS camera and has no obvious way to accommodate NAI lenses. One notable Internet camera expert claims NAI lenses can't even mount on the N70. Firstly, that claim is untrue. It warrants a user to use caution when using an NAI lens on an AI Nikon that has not been modified to accept NAI lenses, but at least for the N70 it's possible. So, once an NAI lens is mounted, can it be used? Yes. Can it be metered? Yes. Here's how:

1- Press the lens release and rotate the lens about 1/10th of a rotation until the shutter (which need to be set at the proper aperture) closes.
2- Take a meter reading and press and hold the auto exposure lock button.
3- Rotate the lens to lock it back in place, still holding the AEL button, and verify your focus.
4- Take your photos.

Alternately, you can take a meter reading, change the camera's mode to manual, set the shutter speed appropriately, and take your shot.

Now you can use your N70 for lots of old, great, suffixed Nikkor lenses! So, onto the shots. These all had a yellow filter to assist in contrast enhancement. Any post-processing will be noted.


1/100th of a second, f16. Chains alongside a park sidewalk. Even at the margins, the Nikkor-H captures detail and retains good image quality. This is a very well designed lens.


1/2,500th of a second, f2. This shot required some post-processing. The flower, being yellow, was exceedingly bright on the image. With the magic wand set at 55 and contiguous, I masked the flower. Then feathered it at 75 pixels, copied the selection, and pasted it on the image. I dropped the layer's gamma to about .15 and set the transparency at 75% or so.This resulted in sufficient detail within the flower.


1/80th, f11. Same process as above to correct some ultra-white areas, except that the wand was not set to contiguous. This resulted in vein detail in leaves that otherwise had no detail (about 15% of the photo.)



1/2,500th at f4. The cloud's center was a bit over-white, so it got the mask and gamma treatment, too. no other post-processing. I just like this because the sky came in extremely dark, which doesn't always happen with a yellow filter.


1/2,500th at f2.8. Post-processing included automatic contrast correction (which had almost no effect anyway.) My goal here was to make a "3-D" image where the grasses seemed to jump out of the picture. It's about halfway there. The Nikkor-H may not be a good lens for 3-D effects; it's too well engineered.


1.4,000th of a second at f2. This one had no post-processing at all. The goal was the same as above, but with less success.

This day's photos suffered from two hindrances: 1- I was in a new place and didn't know what to expect photographically and 2- I was more focused on learning how to use the NAI lens on the N70 that with photo composition. The latter being my own fault. But the N70, as is typical, returned great shots in terms of dynamic range, image quality, and tonality.