Back on November 23, 2009, I wrote this post talking about how many film shots I had taken to date. In that post, Earl made the following comment:

Paul, as i read your post I wondered if being in Charleston on your own each week with evening time to develop and scan has made your usage of film easier or more enjoyable? If you were home in Charlotte would finding time for film be harder to come by?

Though I could not remember when it was said nor what exactly was said, I did remember the theme of the comment. So, this morning I searched my blog for ‘time to develop’ and fortunately, those 3 words did follow each other and I was able to find the post and the comment once again. I am thankful for the ability to search.

Though this is only the beginning of my third week back, I am in full swing with the tasks of daily life. In a way, my life has not changed: I still get up every morning, do my 20 minutes of meditation, prepare my clothes for work, shower, get dressed, drive to work, etc. The evenings are where there is a difference. There are more things to do, wash dishes, take Hobbs for a walk, eek out a bit of time for photography, talk to Tony (if he is ever at home), talk to the wife, and on and on.

Physically, there are so many more windows in this house than I had in the apartment. Lots and lots of windows, which means that light, whether artificial or natural streams into the house. I wanted a lot of windows, so this is not a bad thing, unless you are trying to find a place to develop film. There is but one location suitable for loading film into developing tank, a downstairs bathroom which is one of two rooms in the house having no windows; the other room is the laundry room. The advantage of the bathroom is that it has a lock on the door. No one can accidentally open the door while I’m loading film.

As you probably know, doors are not exactly light tight. I’ll have to drape a blanket over the door to keep the extraneous light out. In the apartment I could turn off all of the lights and it would be quite dark in the bathroom. No need for blankets or anything; however, as there are other people in the house who rather prefer to have lights on, well … you get the idea. LOL!

Currently, I have one roll of film that I want to develop. Perhaps I’ll do it tonight. I know that tomorrow will not be an option. I’ll be busy, busy, busy tomorrow evening and probably won’t get home until about 10:00 PM. However, it will be plenty dark at that time.

So, Earl, now that I’m back here in Charlotte, I can see that developing film will be a challenge, but I intend to stick with it because I enjoy it; however, that said, I’ve made plans for other things that haven’t quite worked out the way that I planned! In looking through my film archives, I don’t have any photos of Charlotte anywhere. I need to fix that!

For about 10 months, I’ve been using a variety of film cameras, all with so called ‘normal’ lenses mounted on them. Normal, meaning having about the equivalent angle of view that we see while looking straight ahead. For a 35 mm camera, that would be a 50 mm lens. On the Mamiya 645e, that is an 80 mm lens. On my D300, considering the crop factor, that comes out to about 32 mm, give or take. The nearest focal length being a 35 mm lens. I don’t own one of those, but I do have a 50 mm that I’ve been using, or a focal equivalent and field of view of a 75 mm lens.

For this shot, which is a different view of yesterday’s shot, I had in mind what it would look like through a 50 mm, backed up, looked, and it was nowhere near what I thought it would look like. I was really feeling the red and white stripes of the railroad crossing arm against the color of the sky as well has the blossoms in the background.

Looking through the 50 mm/75 mm equivalent, it was very much cropped. I had to back up quite a bit to get what I wanted … though I wish that the fence wasn’t there, but what can you do other than go with it? To get this shot, I had to almost walk into the street. It’s a pretty busy street in both directions, so better to stay on the sidewalk.

I had been using my film cameras for B & W exclusively, mainly for convenience and to keep costs down. Now, maybe I’ll have to borrow a move from the Chris Klug handbook and shoot Fujichrome or something. It has been dozens of years since I’ve done that. It could be quite satisfying!

I think that to keep things on level playing ground, it’s time to get a 35 mm lens, which is much, much less expensive than getting a D700 unless someone wants to sell me one the same price as the lens. If so, contact me via e-mail and I’ll send the check right away!

The other day I was in Due West, SC. Due West, you might say; That sounds like a little town somewhere way off the main highway, over yonder. Well, you’d be right. It’s the home of Erskine College. Tony was visiting the college … my goodness, is it that time already?! I remember when he was just a toddler and watching endless repetitions of Sesame Street!

Anyway, Vera and I were waiting for him to finish, so we decided to walk for a couple of hours, have lunch, walk a bit more. Well, certainly walking is her thing. She loves it. It was a nice day, about 70 degrees or so, not a cloud in the sky. I decided that I would walk with her and take my Leica with me and photograph the scenes, such as they were in Due West.

I almost talked myself out of it. After all it was shortly after high noon, the light was harsh and full of shadows. No “pretty” light here. I decided to take the camera and hope for the best.

Overall, I was pleased with the results. I got some decent shots, certainly this would nat have been a day to do portraits without a diffuser, but if it’s nice, deep shadows that you’re looking for, this type of weather will work.

Sometimes it’s just peachy to get away from what you believe will work and try some different things. Exploring. I think that the old school bicycle, basket and all, personifies this sleepy little town.

“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised. ~~Chinua Achebe”

Finally, I am able to share some things that I had not been able to share earlier, or didn’t feel comfortable doing while employed with a defense contractor.

From 1986 until 1992, I worked for Raytheon, a defense contractor. At the time, they were known as E-Systems, Garland Division. When I left there I swore to myself never to return to defense contract work, especially in any capacity that required a secret clearance or above. There were no noble reasons behind it, I just didn’t like the hassle of the clearance and all that it entailed. The invasion of privacy, big brother and all that.

Flash forward to July 2008, 16 years outside of defense. I took another job as an employee of a government contractor. Never say never. I didn’t give it too much of a thought. I needed a job, so I went back in. It was the closest thing that I could get to home. Problem solved … at least for the first 10 months, or so. As part of the job, we had to pay a visit to an Air Force base in Jacksonville, Florida around the June timeframe, I think. Let’s call it June 2009. The four of us were looking forward to going and getting to see the aircraft where our software would be installed.

The first day was a travel day, nothing doing until the next morning. The next morning, we got up, met in the lobby, and ate breakfast together. A couple of our sponsors were there, so we ate with them. As we ate, somehow the conversation turned to work and the ‘hopes’ for the system. Talk turned to kill ratios, and effective kill zones, and the efficiency of killing. Talk continued about bad guys and how they deserved to be killed and that the system that we were working on would allow the Navy to have a lower cost per kill. Truthfully, I was speechless, almost tearful. I was embarrassed. I sat mute.

The rest of the stay was pretty gray for me. I was in the dumps, but didn’t share my opinions with anyone else. Everyone else, it seemed, was into it and proud of the system. I, on the other hand was seriously conflicted. I thought: I spend all of this time, after work, marveling at the wonder that life is and appreciating all living things, but by day, I lend my abilities to death and destruction. I am a willing participant.

I sat with these feelings for months and months and finally decided to have a discussion with my wife. She told me that if that was how I felt, and she understood, then I should just quit immediately and find a job back home. I started looking, but none were available. Obviously, I kept the job, but the wind had gone out of my sails. The project, though a demo, was a success and lauded by a great many. Certainly, had I not be there to do it, they would have gotten someone else to do it and it might well have been a success.

Eventually, I moved onto another project that was basically administrative in nature. It gathered data, but deep down, it gathered data for the purposes of staging attacks, etc. Sigh. When the the word came down that I had been let go, it was a disappointment in that my ego felt a bit bruised, after all, I had been doing a good job. Later, after a few days, I felt rather elated and didn’t know why. One morning, while meditating, the answer popped up. You are no longer in conflict about your job.

Looking back, I wish that I had had the ability to pull out right as the conflict hit, but as I’m learning, sometimes you just have to sit with things and they will resolve themselves for the betterment of everyone.

I’ve been using these Lightroom presets for a while. I’ve mentioned them before and they bear mentioning again. They are Micky G’s Black & White Presets for Lightroom.

I’ve often wondered how good/accurate they are. I’ve been pleased with them, to say the least. While I was out shooting last week, I came upon the scene pictured here and took a number of photos with my 645e. At that time, I just happened to remember that I wanted to make a comparison of a real film shot with one of the B&W presets. Well, I was shooting with some 10 year Tech Pan and that, unfortunately, is not in the preset list. However, a close cousin, Agfa Pan 25 is. Since I was shooting on the tripod, I decided to go for it.

I took the shot, first, with the 645e at f/5.6, removed the camera, put on the D300 with the 18-270 mm Tamron, moved the zoom to 35 mm, approximating a normal lens, adjusted the aperture to f/5.6, and took the same shot.

As many of you will notice this is not exactly a controlled experiment. First, f/5.6 on a 35 mm camera does not give the same depth of field as f/5.6 on a medium format camera. I’m not quite sure what the relationship is, but i probably should have gone a stop higher on the 645e. You can see the difference in DOF between the two but, in truth, I really like the DOF fall off of the 645e. I remember shooting with my view camera and f/5.6 was like shooting at f/1.4 on a 35 mm. There was hardly any DOF at all.

In looking at the two photos, I’m quite impressed with the job that the filter did. It looks pretty realistic. I tried not to tweak much at all with either of the photos and I like the whites of the film better; however, that could easily, very easily be tweaked to make them look the same, but out of the box, that’s a pretty good starting point!

What do you think?

I think that those of us who have been shooting film for quite some time tend to romanticize our favorite films. I know that I do. For me, there were two films that I always tried to keep on hand. Agfa Pan 25 and Kodak Tech Pan 25. Yeah, I was, and still am a big fan of very low ISO, tight-grained film.

You could probably do the same thing with digital, but I don’t see someone going back and waxing romantically about a 4 MP digital camera, but who knows. I guess that any thing is possible.

So it was that I ended up in Bull Hole in Coolomee, NC with 2 rolls of expired Tech Pan 25. Tech Pan was known to have very high contrast and was almost a lithographic film, great for copying line drawings, etc. However, if developed properly, it could deliver some great tonality and nearly untouchable, unseeable grain.

I had planned to use these two rolls on something else, but when I saw the forest, the snow, the river, and the rocks, well, let’s just say that a guy can change his mind two.

After shooting both of the rolls, I was quite satisfied. I even did a couple of comparison shots, taking the same shot with both the film and a digital camera, just to see what the differences were. More on that in a different post.

This evening, I could hardly wait to get the rolls into the soup, or at least one of the rolls. As the film is 10 years past expiration date, I hoped that everything would turn out right. I developed them, waited the appropriate time for them to rinse, then had a peek. At first, the negatives looked a bit thin and low contrast, but after they dried and I scanned them, they were all pretty darn good!

As I remembered, the grain was almost impossible to see and the look of the photos was just as I liked them. The top photo is a little contrasty, but it was taken at about 10 AM with a pretty hefty does of sunlight entering from the right. I love the shot.

The other shot, of the beech tree, well what can I say. This tree was one handsome model.

I can’t wait to see what’s on the other roll!