When all else fails, Experiment!

I didn’t shoot much at all last week. I have a few technical ideas, things I would like to try with one or another of the cameras or lighting/staging rigs I’d like to build, but no real will or interest, or even much time to do any of it, and no ideas or inspiration about what to shoot.

So when it came time to set up this week’s posts—News Flash: I set the weekly posts up on the weekend, sometimes weeks in advance, if I have a good thing going)—I didn’t have anything ready. So what to shoot?

I’m still wanting to find a way to digitize negatives, but am currently stuck at how to keep the negatives flat and equidistant from the sensor while also being easy to move from frame to frame, and I don’t yet know what lens to use. I might yet work on that this weekend, but better to go ahead and get posts knocked out so I don’t have that hanging over my head.*

But how to do that and still learn something?

Well, as mentioned, I need to figure out which lens to use. It should be sharp, with a relatively flat focus plane, and bright enough to stand some extension OR easily reversible.

That is very likely the mamiya/sekor 50mm f/2. But it might be the EL-Nikkor CP-2 50mm f/2.8.

And what did I have on the camera at the time? The Petzval. (It’s been awhile since I shot with it, and I haven’t spent enough time with it.)

So, with allergies in full effect, I just started playing around. First, I shot with the Petzval extended by about 42mm. Boring.

Then I extended it all the way to 96. Still boring.

~Boredom is Counterrevolutionary.

But wait… what’s this? The mamiya/sekor 50, just sitting right here. What would it look like if I held it up in front of the extended Petzval?

Bingo:

And an interesting thing happened:

With the mamiya/sekor reversed, we get a tiny depth of field and an extra smooth blur. But with the mamiya/sekor facing the correct way, the macro effect of the extension is nullified, and the field of view changes to something close to what the 50 would produce on its own, rather than what the 85 would make.

Does that make sense?

From the position in the office where I shot this and with the 85 by itself, I can see about 7 strips of blinds. With the 50 by itself, I can see 10. There are 9 strips showing in the picture above…

SubhanAllah. Physics of light is amazing: project 50mm worth of light down an 85mm tube, you get something close to 50mm of light. Now I remember the reversing and stacking of lenses back in the 365 project (see this, this, this, and/or this), and the necessity of stacking the wider angle in front to avoid vignetting, but I think I must have gotten it wrong: it’s not that the 50mm is getting narrowed down to 85mm, the 50mm is somehow filling the 85…

Can someone with some maths/physics/whatever help me out here, if you’ve gotten this far?

Anyway, that was fun, and maybe something to play with some more in the future.

D7000, Lomography x Zenit 85mm f/2.2 Petzval, extended, at f/4, with mamiya/sekor 50mm f/2 handheld out in front (reversed or straight) at f/2, ISO100, AP mode. Continue reading “When all else fails, Experiment!”

Digitizing Film Without a Scanner (pt. 3)

And it was close, but no cigar…

As you flip through the pictures below, note a couple of things: 1) the warp in the film; 2) the focus (or lack thereof); 3) the color.

So my cardboard-and-tape film duplicating contraption failed to keep the film flat. Additionally, it was just a bit shy of the minimum distance needed to focus, even with the (admittedly slight) extension.

Sort of a shame, really. There are a couple of pictures of Olive and Ivan on the roll, and a couple of selfies, a few random snapshots around the Grigsby, and some shots from a few photowalks. The out of focus ones I’m sharing today came from the Dallas Blooms walk and the downtown McKinney photowalk. (That reminds me: I never shared anything from the roll of Ilford that I finished up just before starting the roll that these came from… maybe one day soon.)

In fact, I shot some of the same shots (or shots from a very similar vantage point) with the D7000 and Sigma 30mm f/1.4… Just for fun, let’s compare them…

digital
digital
previously unreleased|29|©JamesECockroft-20140914
Film
Ohne Titel
Digital
Film

A few things to note:

  • my vision and color sense have changed a bit…
  • the 35ZF has a light leak
  • the digital version looks a bit glossy, detached, clinical (the change in my vision/color sense, and the addition of monitor calibration have something to do with this, but still… maybe I should reprocess the digital ones when/if I get the negatives scanned a bit better)
  • the film version has some character, a more physical quality, some soul. Sure, the pictures aren’t sharp,* but they have a character that just isn’t in the original.

Assuming you made it this far, which do you prefer? Why?

I want to shoot more film… Continue reading “Digitizing Film Without a Scanner (pt. 3)”

Digitizing Film Without a Scanner (pt. 2)

So yesterday, I went through the rationale for this project (apologies for the long-windedness of that article), and the first evening of tests. Today, we’ll look at some examples from my first attempts with 35mm color negatives and their foibles.

While hunting through my film archives, I came across a color roll that I didn’t remember. It’s not cut or sleeved, and not wrapped around a cardboard tube like the b/w film from that pro shop that doesn’t handle pro film stocks any longer. I had no immediate recollection of it, and it was only later that I realized where it came from. Yep, it’s was shot and developed over 2 years ago, and I’d never seen the pictures off of it (and still haven’t, for the most part).

I had some early missteps, but with missteps come happy accidents:

At the top of the frame, you can see edge of the holder I created… good times. And except for forgetting to set the white balance on the camera to compensate for the orange mask on the film, I was sure I had it. Continue reading “Digitizing Film Without a Scanner (pt. 2)”