We love cooking and baking. The upside of being on a diet is that one can get much more inventive with food. Our latest experiments have been with Wraps, and also a lovely Orange & Fennel Salad.
One thing we have been doing is cutting down on Bread and Pasta.
This has meant no home made bread. I think though I am going to change track slightly. When we want bread we have been helping ourselves to a few slices of cheap supermarket bread.
Instead of occasional bread of poor quality, I am going to make two high quality home loafs every couple of weeks to give me my bread baking fix.
This is going to one of many post dated blog entries generally about film photography. One of the delights and difficulties about shooting film is the time between taking the image to actually viewing the image. This can be a benefit and also a negative.
Well all the pieces had finally arrived and I was ready to take my first large format photograph with my very own large format camera. I had done some large format photography before but it was either on a course or hired equipment, this would be my first shot with my own large format camera.
It was never going to be brilliant but the purpose of these first shots was to test my ability to load and unload the dark slides, meter correctly and use the camera correctly. There is a lot to go wrong in large format film photography.
This evening in the late afternoon spring sunshine, the old wooden chair we had made many years ago was looking particularly photogenic.
I have looked at this chair nearly every day for over ten years but today I had the perfect excuse to photograph it, my finished large format Ebony 4 x 5 inch Large Format Camera.
Last year I had managed to pick up a mint Large Format Nikkor 150mm f/5.6 standard lens, and since then I have been added accessaries such as dark slides, a lupe and a dark cloth. The Camera a Ebony 45s, came on the 3rd April, a mint condition secondhand model from Robert White. The reason I have not used it for the last two days was because I had no way to attach it to the tripod. Another order to Robert White and an Arca plate for the camera was quickly dispatched to me.
I was torn between black and white, and colour but in the end, the warmth of the late evening sunlight decided; it would be colour.
So with fresh inspiration flowing through my veins I checked out what film I currently had loaded; as I was wanting to capture a ‘real’ image and only film would do, it was also the perfect excuse to try out the Ebony for Real.
Luckily I had a few sheets of 5 x 4 Fuji Provia RDP100 already loaded, as I had gone out that morning to test the camera out but had not used it (don’t ask: but it involved a trip to a Windmill and a heavy tripod left in the garage at home, thus no film used).
I whipped out the Ebony 5 x 4 and mounted it on my largest heaviest tripod, a Gitzo Series 5. For some reason I had committed a cardinal sin, in that I had not put away the large format camera without first centring all the movements, unfortunately I did not notice while setting up.
With the camera mounted firmly on the tripod, I chose my large format Nikkor 150mm f/5.6; a nice standard lens on 5 x 4 inch format. I opened up the lens aperture to its widest setting, and set the shutter open to enable me to focus.
Focusing a large format camera is a very different experience to that of a modern SLR. The lens has an aperture setting but also has a shutter built into it. The Camera is just a light tight box. The lens clips onto the front of the camera, and to focus you need to lock the shutter open to allow the light through to shine on the glass panel focusing screen attached to the back of the camera. The front of the camera holding the lens and the back of the camera holding the glass focusing screen are linked by a soft leather bellows. To actually focus you move the lens on the front and the back glass screen forwards and backwards until the image projected onto the back glass screen is in focus.
The large format camera like my medium format camera lacks a built in meter, so out came the handheld meter. Metering the scene I selected a 1/2 second exposure at f/34. The Nikkor lens allows apertures to be set in 1/3 stops, which is useful, as the copal shutter in the lens only works in whole stops.
With the meter reading taken I closed the lens ready to take the photograph. Setting the shutter speed and aperture I then cocked the shutter and tripped the shutter. The shutter tripped so I knew the lens and shutter were closed and it was safe to load the film. If I had been unable to trip the shutter then the shutter was still open and it would not have been safe to load the film.
I slid in a fresh dark slide behind the glass focusing screen and removed the dark slide’s cover. To make life easier for myself I have a cable release attached to all my large format lens so thats one last task to have to worry about, I then tripped the shutter. Reversing the dark slide’s cover and sliding it back in, I then removed the dark slide. The covers are colour coded, a white tag means unexposed and a black tag means exposed.
So here it is my first photograph taken with my new Ebony, i’ll admit it it will not win any awards as the contrast was too high for the film, but one that I am pleased with.
My first Large Format Photograph, Ebony 45s, Fuji Provia 100, 1/2 second exposure at f/34
Not a brilliant shot, but it did what was necessary, it tested everything out and it all worked. More importantly my metering was right, always a worry for film cameras with no meters built in.
I’ll be going out again later in the month shooting some more large format film. These shots like the one above will not be artistic master pieces, in fact I expect them to be quite poor, but it will enable me to master my technique, then I can move on to more creative shots.
For personal use my Desktop / Laptop of choice is an Apple Mac, while at the Day Job I mainly use Windows with a bit of Solaris, Red Hat and CentOS thrown in for good measure.
Most OS’s are pretty good now a days and the old complaints about Windows and the Blue Screen of Death are mainly in the past; but by personal choice, when I can, I use Mac OS X as my day to day OS and Ubuntu as my home server.
The Mac OS while not perfect does an excellent job of not getting in the way while you work. One of the few iritations is with the Mac UK Keyboard. While they manage to fit the £, $, €, the # seems to be missing.
When editing code which needs the # or when tweeting, beginner Mac users find themselves searching the net, to try and find out where the lost # key has gone. A situation I myself have to confess to.
Odd as it seems its not missing, a quick press of Option-3 (or Alt-3) brings up the hash (#) symbol. They just seemed to have not printed it on the keyboard. Odd and strange, but then many Windows users would say that about Apple Mac’s!
PS, I was watching an American video tutorial recently on bash shell scripting and he refered to the hash (#) as the pound symbol, is this another area where English UK and English USA differs?
Colour and Color, two nations separated by a common language.
With another wedding coming up this weekend it was time to check over the camera gear and especially check the flash and camera batteries.
One of my batteries was completely dead. I gave it a charge and it dropped 3% in no time at all. Now I always have fully charged batteries before going into a shoot and a couple of fully charged spares, just in case.
With something as important as a Wedding it was a trip to the local London Camera Exchange to get a replacement. As always I got a good deal with a very nice discount.
I have a mix of batteries some official manufacturer versions and some third party batteries. So far its always been the third party batteries that have failed, I am starting to think its false economy buying third party batteries; they certainly do not seem to be lasting as well.
This week things are back to normal. In fact normal work life hit yesterday when my boss phoned as we had a major issue. So today was busy busy busy.
Last week was fantastic, such a great mix of activities. On the photography front there was Wedding and Landscape Photography, the Landscape Photography was more location scouting, the shot above taken with my Nikon Series 1 V1 and RAW file processed on location on my iPad using SnapSeed, if money was no object I would carry a MacBook Air, but then if money was no object I would be spending just about every free minute of my time doing photography.
As previous mentioned, we also managed some motorcycling in the North Yorkshire Dales, fantastic roads, fantastic scenery and we even got to practice some serious water crossings; on a bike; thats interesting!
A seven mile hike was also fitted in, following the river, from Aysgarth Falls, which is where the photography above was taken from.
We also managed to celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary, champagne was the order of the day. We even went for a 2.7 mile run before lunch in the continued effort to get fit.
I also received back, my first developed shots from my Ebony Large Format Camera. I had sent seven off to be developed and all seven came back spot on. There not photographic master pieces but at least they all came out and were correctly exposed.
I’ll be posting results up in the coming months, in fact one of the last shots I took was last months photography of the month, its not great but being film and an early shot on my long road to learning the ins and outs of Large Format Photography, its one that I am pleased with.
Not quite the shot I wanted. There had been storm clouds behind the Cathedral and Castle but bright evening sunshine illuminated the field. Then the rain came, and I could not get the shot until the rain cleared, unfortunately the dark clouds had cleared as well. Still a pleasing shot.
This week we hit the road. A few days away to rest and recuperate.
We wanted to do a little location scouting, a bit of walking and a bit of Motorcycling. From the sound of it most of those items seem a little conflicting. On a bike you are a little restricted with regard to luggage space.
Ruck sacks and walking gear take up a lot of room and so space for camera gear is extremely limited. Though taking pictures was not a primary goal. We had visited the area last year for a bike trip and spotted a few areas that needed a more detailed investigation.
We started on Tuesday, which was a bike trip up the east coast. The Humber Bridge is now free to cross for Motorcycles so that was our first destination. We crossed the Humber and had our first break at the Cafe there.
We then continued up the east coast to Bridlington and finally Scarborough, before turning west to head for our final destination Aysgarth in the North Yorkshire Dales.
We had stopped here before and wanted to try a walk in the area, in particular near the river and falls.
Wednesday was a walk, a 7 mile walk along the river a valley, trying to spot the best locations to shoot the river, falls and Bolton Castle
Unlike Tuesday which was sunny all day, Wednesday started off with light drizzle, but not enough to put us off. Camera wise I was packing light, just a Nikon Series 1 V1 and two small zooms. I also had a GorillaPod tripod, not brilliant but better then nothing to try and catch the obligatory time laps shot of the river.
The weather improved and sun came out, making it a great and very enjoyable walk. I managed to spot a number of great view points where I would like to come back with my Landscape Photography gear. Unfortunately due the amount of rain in the previous few days the river was extremely high and swollen and it was not worth the risk to get to close.
As you can see in the above shot, it’s an area that shows photographic promise, and the next trip will be in the car so I can bring more gear and more importantly my heavy series 5 Gitzo.
I had also taken with me the iPad and these RAW files were processed on it using the SnapSeed App.
That night we put the diet to one side and enjoyed a rather nice meal. Bottle of wine, followed by a selection of fine Yorkshire Cheeses. Well we had walked 7 miles over Hill and Dale!
Thursday it was time to head home.
A gentle ride through the national park, heading south thought the middle of England.
Biking, Walking/Photography and more Biking; what more could anyone want from a holiday.
On the photography front, last week I did some corporate portraits.
These can vary from environmental portraits, simple grab shots of people working to more formal shots. Sometimes these involve the absolute minimum of equipment, just a camera and flash, finding an area with an uncluttered background; other times its more like a full studio shoot. You take in C-Stands, a background, my portable Elinchrom Flash gear and a high end SLR. A lot depends on the amount of time your customer will allow you to have and setup time.
Sometimes all they want is you to come in, fire off a few shots and get out again. Others will allow you to take over a meeting room for a day, you can set it up as a studio and work in a far more controlled manor. Its important to make your customer understand what you need to deliver the results they need.
This week its personal photography. I’ll be scouting for waterfalls in North Yorkshire. Its not a full on photography trip, the main thing is to find some good locations and take a few reference shots.
I’ll be travelling light and taking the minimum of equipment.
I needed to check something this morning on the Royal Mail Tracking Website, and found according to them the Mac OS and Browser is not supported.
Come on Companies, in this day and age I would expect at least support for common internet standards allowing any standards based OS and Browser to work over the internet.
