Special Edition: Golden Gate Park

Last Wednesday I did not get to take a camera out, so fortoday's post I'll share what I had originally planned to save for this Saturday as a special post. Instead, you can see these photos today. As is normal for Saturdays, I don't track the lens and film combinations towards the goal of using a unique combination every day this year. Also, this trip had three films: Ilford PANF 50, Agfa 100, and TMax 400. The TMax is still in the camera and I'll finish it this weekend or sometime next week.


Trees at Sunset. Agfa film. The trees appear to be lit up because the sunset was casting them in red light. With a red filter, that light became lighter compared to the rest of the image. I expected this to be blurry as it was hand-held at about 1/15th or 1/8th of a second.


Urban waterfall, a creek at the National AIDS Memorial. When without a tripod, flat rocks will do nicely. Afga film.


Not entirely sure I care for the way the Agfa rendered these rocks. Maybe I should have used the red filter I brought that day, like I did with the other images above.


Another waterfall shot. Super contrasty. Agfa again.


Agfa, red filter, effectively making the forest seem even darker at dusk.


The one Ilford shot that turned out. I brought a roll marked "27" but it only had four exposures. This was shot resting on a fence on a four- or six-second exposure, f22. At 75mm, this may actually have been around f29 or f32. There were kids playing in front of the building, all effectively gone due to the long exposure.

F3 Delivers Again

My Nikon F3 has become one of the three most important cameras in my collection, behind my K1000 -- the first SLR I ever owned -- and my Pentax K-7. In fact, I like my F3 so much that I've decided to get a second DSLR this year, a Nikon D5100 or D300 (The jury is still out on whether I want to use my NAI lenses on a DSLR.) That said, the F# does have one small issue -- the LCD in the viewfinder is dead so I never know what shutter speed I'm shooting, just the aperture. This was also my first outing with Efke 35mm film. Currently, my favorite film lineup goes a bit like this in 35mm:

1- Efke 100 ISO
2- Pan-x 125 ISO
3- TMax 400 ISO
4- Everything else.

That will change as I use different films. For instance, I want to use Adox in 35mm as well as Fuji Acros. And I suspect that with the right conditions Ilford 50 ISO would be a very enjoyable film to shoot. As for today's photos, I hope that you'll be plenty pleased. This roll returned some of the best results I've gotten this year. The F3 tends to do that.


f3.5. A long exposure, though. It was somewhat overcast at the beginning of my walk, and drizzly.


f11. A fountain in a courtyard area.


f22. I wonder what the heck that is.


f11. Well that helps a little. Actually, no it doesn't. I was just lying there.


f5.6 Oh, of course. Those were interior shots of the sculpture Icoaspirale. Why didn't I guess that the first time?

This sculpture falls soundly into the "I don't get it, but I really like it" category. Were the inside inaccessible, it would be a much different piece and much weaker for it.


f8. A seagull searching for french fries.


f11. Another seagull searching for french fries. Seagulls, I may have mentioned before, are disease bags. But they're okay in my book because they like fries.


f16. Let's just appreciate this image a moment. It's not going to win any prizes, nor will anyone ever hang it on a gallery wall. But it conveys the Efke film's quality in a clear, and appreciable way. When I upload images to my holding pen in Picasa, I shrink them to 1000 pixels wide by about 630 tall (depending on the image.) As a baseline, the longest dimension is 1000 pixels. This makes the images between .6 and .8 megapixels. I also compress them to 10, which makes them all about 150KB. Posted on this page, they're further reduced to 550 pixels wide. All that resizing and downgrading and this image has not gained grain or noise, lost meaningful image quality, nor developed strange jpeg artifacts. A lot of the credit rests with the film, and you can see from the water and the first boats that this film records great detail. In addition, the tonal range here is in balance in a way that would make histogram peepers drool. This film is an amazing film. If you ever shoot film, buy one roll of this and try it. This was $6 for 36 exposures. I actually got 28 on the roll. With the right camera, you may get 39 or 40. An amazing number of photos and only $6 for the roll, or so. Just a superb film. I hope it never goes out of production.

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.