Leica M8.2
Leica Elmar-M 24mm f/3.8 ASPH
24mm, 1/20 Sec at f/4, ISO640
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom CC2015.1 V6
On a MacPro, OS-X 10.10.4
The end room takes shape
Our spare end room over the last few months has been stripped down to bare walls and concrete floor. We have plastered painted and decorated. Including painting the roof and open roof beams.
This weekend we finally laid the new floor.
We just have the beading left to put round the edge and its finished.
Then its new book cases and we can unbox the books and also finally setup my hifi. Then we have a smart new space which we can use as a reading room, music room and when necessary a studio space and even somewhere to layout quilts.
Large Format Developing
When one hears about people developing their own film one imagines that for most people this is just not an option. Who has the space to create a darkroom, or as used to be common black out the bathroom.
Well it’s traditional printing you need a darkroom for not developing. I taught Caroline how to develop 35mm film in the kitchen using Patterson developing tanks.
We have all the gear for 35mm developing and I want to start again but the driver is large format. The picture above is an insert for Patterson three reel tanks, I have been waiting for a number of months for them to come back in stock, well now they are, so together with my scanner I hope to do a lot more large format Black & White as well as giving my Leica M4 a workout.
The question next is what film?
Panasonic Release the GX8 – Time to look again at the GX7
When the GX7 was released I was very excited, up to that point cameras with viewfinders were few and far between. Now of course there much more common, from the Olympus OM micro four thirds range right up to high end compacts like the new Leica Q.
A few weekends I spent a day with the OM-D M10 a very accomplished little camera, now that the Panasonic GX8 has been announced i’ll be looking at that put also revisiting the GX7, how does it stand up to the modern opposition, if it will do what I want and I can put up with any issues it might have then it might be an option now that prices are sure to drop.
Models, Blonds or Brunettes?
Over the last twenty years I have worked with a lot of models, and I have heard some photographers and many of the general public refer to models as dump blonds, but what is the truth in my experience.
Well for the start 99.9% of models are very hardworking. No matter if their degree students studying to become doctor’s (as was one of my models) or simply modelling for a little extra cash, or want to be a professional model as there long term career; modelling is not easy.
Try standing in front of bright studio lights, producing an expression that the photographer or director has asked for and maintaining it while the studio lights pump kilo-watts of light into your face.
Its challenging work and does require skill. As far as brightness, well models typify the general public some are very intelligent and retire at twenty five after establishing a model agency and selling up to the highest bidder and others are just girls trying to make a living.
All are hard working and in general I think models are above average in intelligence, they certainly tend to have good heads for business, and know what they are doing, where they want to get to and how they are going to get there.
Harddisks and structuring your data
I have been shooting digital now for nine years. In that time I have a growing collection hard drives.
From a fairly early stage I standardised on LaClie Rugged Firewire drives, ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB, as up to now I have always had Mac Laptops.
I also have three mains powered desktop drives, A old 1 TB LaClie which I now keep my best photographs on as DNG format. A Drobo Array used as a backup target, and my new drive which is a G-Tech EV Thunderbold2 with two 1 TB drives configured at RAID0.
I still have a few things to consider and thats where I put things on the new machine. At the moment my main Lightroom Library is on the internal storage and I have placed all the photographs on the fast Thunderbolt2 external array, and have a 1 TB USB3 drive split into two partitions, one as a Time Machine target for backup and the other holding my iTunes Library.
My oldest LaClie drive is also attached and is set as a Lightroom import backup target and also as a catalogue backup target.
With just the G-Tech and USB drive my office is now silent and I can hear the birds out side.
The Drobo is quite noisy and but gets used once a month for backups.
Interestedly before I bought an extra Thunderbolt2 to Firewire converter and the new Thunderbolt drive; I connected directly into the Drobo and daisy chained everything off that. It definitely slowed things down and I also thought I had a finder issue and spent sometime trying to diagnose the issue.
On boot up my finder would hang for about two minutes before I could use it. It turned out only to do this when the Drobo was connected, so I do wonder if the Drobo is ready for replacement.
A couple larger cheap USB drives also have a copy of all my photographs on, one of these I keep in the office in Lincoln and the other at home, they get swapped and updated monthly so if the worst should happen I still have my work.
Cloud storage also plays its part. I tend to use Dropbox as its available on all the platforms I use from Linux, Mac and Window, plus my phone. I stick a copy of my Lightroom library here.
Cathedral Flowers
While I was in Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday photographing and listening to the orchestra, I tried out a number of different shots and styles, some of which worked better then others.
This shot was taken with a Leica M8 and 50mm Summilux at f/6.7 and 1/8 second.
The slower shutter speed does mean its not tack sharp, but I do find it a pleasing image if one that has not quite worked as I wanted.
My first shot of these scene was sharp but thats in the reject pile; the reason is I shot it wide open and you cannot make out the background. This one while not so sharp, you can at least make out the background.
This picture I feel teaches me three things, its not necessary to have a sharp picture to have a pleasing picture, a lesson I have mentioned before here in this blog. Two, while shooting wide open with a fast lens is an overused style over the last few years, its does not always work and that depth of field is not only a relationship of aperture but also of where you are focusing; the close you focus the less depth of field you have. Lastly noise, I shot the Cathedral photographs with my old Leica M8 which with its CCD sensor has significant noise above 640 ISO and that is generally the limit I shoot with it, but in situations where you have good light ISI 640 while producing noise, the noise is not objectionable.
Busking in Lincoln
Its been a couple of months since I was last in Lincoln to do some photography. This weekend I was lucky enough for it to be the Lincoln Busking Weekend. We also had orchestra practice in the Cathedral, so I got to listen to that as well, which was quite a treat.
Film Friday – Grave Stones
Its another film Friday! Yes, one of the downsides of me having a new scanner is that I get to show you some of my old work. This was taken about ten years ago and is from a period where I was teaching Caroline how to develop Black & White film, something that we enjoy but have not done in at least eight or nine years, but is something I want to get back into.
I hate the argument about what is best film or digital, its like asking a painter what is best, water colours or acrylic, there different and both a valid art form and craft.
The camera I think was a Nikon FM2n, the film was Ilford HP5 Plus rated at its standard ISO 400.
Scanning 35mm Film
I am slowly getting the hang of film scanning. Getting everything clean is the first and major step, after that is relatively simple.
I am using SilverFast which came free with my scanner.
The way I am working is as follows.
- Step One clean and mount the film and scanner plate
- Select Frames and delete all to get rid of the old frame settings
- Select Pre-Scan, at this point it does a basic scan
- Select Frames, Find Frames and select the appropriate film holder, in this case Filmstrip 35mm
- I then select my resolution 6400 ppi for film and then select the film Vendor, film type and ISO.
- Then its a tweak to the Midtones to make the files a little flatter and easier to working on post production, I use +5.
- Select Copy settings to all frames
Now for the time consuming part.
- Zoom into the first frame and adjust the frame to capture all the image
- Tweak the histogram if necessary
- Go to next frame and repeat
Once all frames are done I then select batch scan and have it uniquely number each file and place them in a watch folder.
Its then over to Lightroom where I configure Auto Import. I have found the the default developer settings I use for my Nikon DSLR are a good starting point and I have Lightroom add the current date to the scans filename.
I now go off and have a cup of coffee and leave the computer to do its stuff, the scanner putting the images into the watch folder and then Lightroom automatically importing them, adding some developer settings and meta data and adding them to my main Catalogue image store. If you have a lot of images to scan you can then use this time to prepare your next batch of scans. The Epson V850 came with two sets of holders for each main type of film, 35mm mounted slides, 35mm film, medium format and 5 x 4 large format.