Forgotten skills
Final touches
All this talk of old school film and cameras reminded me of a skill that I once had and took for granted. I just remembered after downloading the Lightroom film presets and playing around with them. Ove asked if I had solarized a particular photo.
Well, no. I didn’t. While in Lightroom I remembered what I used to do to black and white film to get dramatic skies. In my bag I always carried about 2 red filters, a Wratten 25 and Wratten 29, if I remember correctly. These filters were very deep red blocked out blue and cyan light, for the most part. Even back then, I shot most of my stuff on a tripod, so the extra stop or two that I needed for the filters was not an issue. What these filters did was to give dramatic skies. Since it would block all of the cyan light attempting to come through, it would render the skies black, as in the photo on yesterday’s post.
Now, I can do this post process by using the sliders in Lightroom under Grayscale mix. Simply pulling the blue slider all the way to the left makes my sky become very dark and dramatic. I used to carry a green filter as well. If I saw a scene where I wanted the grass to become light, with respect to the other colors, I applied the green filter. It blocked other colors and allowed green light through. Again, all I have to do now is move the green slider to the right to get more green, left for less (darker).
I don’t use color filters anymore because there is no need to. They don’t work well on digital cameras anyway, but I’m glad that that is still there in LR. It just gives me a way continue to experiment with my black and white photos in the digital realm.
For the above shot I pulled back the green sliders a bit to make the grass a little bit darker. When I saw this shot, again from my little field across the street, I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish. A little bit of slider movement, burning here, dodging there, all in Lightroom, and I had what I wanted.
Now that was a sexy camera!
Tri-X Lightroom Preset
Since I talked about film in my last post, I might as well talk about my fantasy camera in this post! That camera was the Nikon F3. It was the Cadillac of cameras back in the day. I worked in the camera department of a store similar to Best Buy. The store, Jewel Mart, had a camera department and I was fortunate enough to work in it. At the time, I was shooting a Minolta XD-11, which took me a long time to save for. At that time, I was making only $3.10/hour and working about 15 hours/week. The XD-11 cost nearly $300 if memory serves me correctly.
One day, we got a new camera in, the Nikon F3. This tank sold for about $750 at the time. According to an online calculator that I found, that puts the value of the camera at about $1,960 in 2009 dollars! Well, this girl was certainly out of my league. A guy making about $45/week just cannot afford a woman like this! But, each time that I got to work, I took her out of the case and fantasied about going out on an assignment, or just out to the parking lot with a pocket full film and a lot of time on my hands!
Ah, what good days those were! 
Every once in a while I’m tempted. It’s amazing what you can get now if you are willing to shoot film. You can get Nikon’s flagship film camera, the F5 for about $200! What a steal!
If you were around in the film era, did you have any fantasy camera?
Stuck on film?
Agfa Pan 25 Lightroom preset
I’m making it a daily habit to visit Chris Klug’s blog. I like it. I’m also intrigued as to why he still uses film. So much so that I asked him to write a post about it. I’ll keep checking back. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with shooting film, to be sure. I’m just kind of an instant gratification guy these days and have been spoiled by digital.
However, I think that when I look back at an image scanned from film it seems to look ‘different’. I’m not sure of different in what way. Digital black and white is, I think, precise. Film seems to have a character all of its own. Though it’s been quite a while, I remember that I used to shoot about 3 different types of film, but only used one type of developer. I didn’t get crazy about my combinations. I just used what worked for me.
My favorite film was the venerable and slow Agfa Pan 25. Man! You almost needed a tripod in bright sunlight! However, this stuff was buttery smooth and you could enlarge it to your heart’s desire and see not a whisper of grain. And talk about tonality. Sweet! It was, if I remember correctly, fairly low to modest on contrast. This, though, was taken care of quite easily by using Kodak’s Polycontrast paper and the right color filter. My color equivalent was Kodachrome 25! I rarely shot color negative. I liked slow film, small grain!
Next up, for general duty and shooting in all types was, as far as I was concerned, the reigning champion of the time, Tri-X. ASA (back then) 400. I could use this film anywhere. I could push it a stop or two and still get some decent pictures. For you younger guys/gals, pushing film meant to shoot at a higher ISO than it was rated. So, pushing one stop was to shoot at 800, 2 stops, 1600. Pushing meant that development time and or temperature had to be increased to give the underexposed shadow detail to develop. If I shot one roll pushed, I’d have to save until I had another to develop so that I could do two rolls at a time.
It certainly was fun, back then and still there is nothing to match the anticipation of waiting for the film to be ready to view, or in seeing your photos develop right in front of your eyes. Nor has the feeling been matched of seeing a favorite photo printed on ‘real’ fiber paper, not resin coated Polycontrast paper. I guess that maybe I can understand the attraction, but now I just prefer less hassle.
While thinking about this post, I just downloaded some free Lightroom presets that mimic certain types of film. The above photo, taken with my D2x at White Sands was done using the Agfa Pan 25 preset.
Addendum: Chris made his post already!
Geomet’r GPS: Remarkably accurate
Field of dreams
Some months ago I purchased a Geomet’r GPS for my camera. Thanks for my good buddy, Earl, who has every possible gadget that I guy could want, I decided to buy one. Actually, it didn’t take much arm bending to do it.
For the most part, it just sits in the bag and waits to be used. It’s not an every day tool. It is useful, however, for marking your location very accurately. Combine that with the ability to click, from within Lightroom, and go directly to Google maps and it’s pretty amazing. Click in the above image to see where I took this picture. It is my little field across the street that I’ve been writing about. If you zoom down to the street level view, by clicking on the little yellow guy, you’ll see it. If you drag and rotate the image, you’ll see my apartment building. It’s the first one next to the parking lot! How’s that for accuracy? The coordinates where the pin was placed is almost exactly where I was standing!
I could have really used this when I went to White Sands National Monument. Do you have an idea of how much one sand dune looks like another!
Not a bad little gadget for $149 USD. They seem to be out of stock everywhere, though. Not much to say today. It’s April 15th and the tax man cometh and taketh away from me! 
Story elements
Springtime in Summerville, SC
I love to read fiction, especially good fiction. Also, if I happen to see a movie that contains all of the elements of good story telling, then I tend to remember that movie for some time.
The elements of storytelling are, in no particular order:
- Setting: Where the story takes place, time, location
- Point of view: Who’s telling the story
- Plot: How the story is told. The steps, or sequence of events
- Theme: The underlying message of what the story is about.
- Character: The main participant
- Conflict: some type of struggle, either internal or external
My wife’s all time favorite movie is Seven years in Tibet. This movie, may or may not appeal to you. It depends, I think, on where you are in your life.
The general theme of the movie is change, or perhaps self-discovery, or maybe even renewal. This movie had it all, well placed, and in great measure. It’s probably my favorite Brad Pitt movie. My favorite movie series was The Matrix. Wow! It was more than just a special effects orgy. The theme was about discovery, about discovering that we are one with the Universe. It was all about casting off masks, breaking out of the Matrix, discovering reality, etc. When I watched it the first few times, I didn’t connect; however, after a lot of Tao reading, etc. It began to make sense. I could say that perhaps that is not what the author intended, but the story had enough in it to make sense to me in that way. There is a lot of discussion about it around the web. People take different meanings from it.
As we approach the SoFoBoMo starting line, I’m trying to solidify a theme, a setting, and a plot. It might seem a lofty goal for a 30-day project, but I want to give it a go. Last year’s project was haphazard, but I liked it anyway. There was, however, one section that I particularly liked better than the others, that was the Yin/Yang section. It had a theme. Click the image to the right to see last year’s book.
This year, I might do something about the flow of life. I might just do it in the field across the street. After all, everything occurs there. Birth. Death. Struggle. Triumph. Failure. Competition. It’s all there. That could be my setting. My time line would, of course, be the SoFoBoMo month. The characters, whatever I find like plants, insects, etc. The point of view would be from my point of view could be omniscient limited point of view where I move from character to character and put in my thoughts or feelings about what I see. The plot is the interesting part. How do I put it together to be in line with the theme?
Well, it’s food for thought anyway.
A close call
I’ve written before about my propensity to sell equipment that I’ve not used in while. Sometimes, though, I have to keep this urge in check. At one point, not to long ago, I had considered selling my Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8. This lens is by far the sharpest lens with the most beautiful bokeh that I have seen. I had decided to sell it since I hadn’t been using it. Let’s face it, it’s a tank! It’s very heavy and cannot be used hand-held at all unless you have some really high shutter speeds. My arms shake just thinking about it. I use it on the tripod 100% of the time.
Well, I didn’t sell it. I had taken the pictures of it and was about to put my listing on eBay, but then chickened out at the last moment. I decided to place it on the camera and get reacquainted with it and boy am I glad that I did. This lens have definite “wow” factor. Little needs to be done to the image, especially sharpening. This lens, when you zoom in to 100% all you get is sharpness and hardly any chromatic aberration. All of my lenses should be like this! However, to round out the ‘desired set’. I’d need:
14-24mm f/2.8 ($1800)
24-70mm f/2.8 ($1700)
Nikon D700 ($2700)
Now, let’s see … that comes to $6,200 USD! That’s a lot of paper. I figure that if I have all of those sweet, non-DX lenses, I might as well have a non-DX body! 
Well, at the rate that we are burning through money in my family this year, it ain’t gonna happen! No part of it! Now, if some rich blog reader would like to donate these items … well, how could I say no?
This photo, as well as the photos from the last 4 days have been taken with the 80-200mm. I find it hard to take it off of my camera, now!
Connections
It is always very meaningful to me when a new blogger stops by my blog. I always wonder how they found me on all of the cyber noise. It’s really nice when they decide to post a comment, or two, or three. But what is even more rewarding is when shortly after they appear here and I am reading their blog that I see some of my old familiar blog family posting there a day or two later. I like that!
Such is the case with Chris Klug’s blog, Patterns of Light n’ Dark. Chris stopped by for the first time, I believe, last week, made some nice posts, and hung in there when my Spam Karma 2 kept telling him that he was a spammer and refusing to post his comments. Well, SK2 and I finally came to an understanding, I think, and now Chris can post.
Chris was, in a former career, a lighting designer and his photographs have beautiful lighting. I’ve been looking at them and trying to see what I can learn from them.
Now that I’m going on year 4, which hard to believe, I can think of many of the people who have dropped by and visited during that time. Sometimes I go back through old posts and see their names, click on their links, and a lot of times am disappointed because they are no longer blogging. However, there always seems to be someone new to come along, for a season, and add a new dimension to this blog.
I just love it! It’s one of the things that makes blogging very much worthwhile.