More film camera issues

When I decide to do something, I usually just go all in.  I know I should probably take my time and work up to things, but it's just not what I do.

Take, for example, my recent acquisition of a WWII era Speed Graphic.  Photo here:

Now, I already have the Graphic View camera, so why did I need this?  Well, of course, I didn't.  But I wanted to do a project and this camera was necessary.

Historically, this is a cool camera.  It weighs a ton and I don't really know how the journalist photographers back in the day could lug this thing around and actually get photos of any action.  It's not conducive.  But that's what they did and most every photo in a newspaper or magazine from the early 1900s until just after WWII would have been taken with a camera like this.  I like this history.

But, my real purpose was to use an old lens that I've been carrying around since 1980.  In my grad school days in an optics lab, I rescued an old war surplus Kodak Aero Ektar aerial photography lens that we had bought for cannibalization purposes.  The optics were great, and I could not bring myself to see the thing go in the dumpster, so I saved it.  I always wanted to use it to make a large format camera, but never knew how to start.

Recently I realized there are other strange photographers like me who also have AE lenses, and they found a way to retrofit them into the Speed Graphic cameras.  See, the SG camera has a focal plane shutter in addition to the normal leaf shutter in the front lens, so an AE retrofit without a leaf shutter will still work.

Great, you say.  So what?  Why go to all the trouble?

And the answer is:  Portraits.

The AE lens on the SG body gives you a 7-inch focal length with f/2.5 speed onto a 4 x 5 inch negative.  That means very small depth of field, perfect for portraits.  Plus, the positional adjustments available with the rails on the SG camera allow some funky control over perspective and focus area.  Look at this photo, for example courtesy of (https://www.facebook.com/macieklesniakfotografia?fref=photo):

By playing around with the positioning of the lens board with respect to the film plane, you can control what areas of the image are in focus and which are not.  Here's another more extreme example courtesy of (https://www.facebook.com/kornel.kabaja.portrety/photos/a.617290181622240.1073741828.617195194965072/1093089077375679/?type=1&theater)

OK, so maybe you don't care about this stuff, but I think it's cool and I wanted to play around with it some.  So, I take my 50 year-old lens and my 70 year old camera body and make some interesting photos.  That's the definition of a hobby, to me.

Going back to film

I really like my digital cameras.  Really.  Like. Them.

And when I have to shoot something important, I'm very happy to have the instant review features, as well as the latitude of adjustments available when shooting raw.

But, well, it can get sort of boring sometimes.

See, the affordability of high quality digital cameras has created a proliferation of wanna-be photographers that I find incredibly annoying.  In the old days, photography was an actual skill that combined both understanding of light, imaging and chemistry, as well as a trained artistic eye.  Now, anybody with $1000 can actually make images with high technical quality.  Of course, they mostly don't have the creative eye, but it's surprising how many clients can't tell the difference.

Well, I don't try to make money at this so I don't care about the faux-tographers unless they get in my way.  But I do like to find ways to set my work apart from theirs, as haughty as that sounds.  Sorry.

So, recently I decided to take up film photography again, as a hobby-art thing.  So I'll post some stuff here about that in case anybody wants to get into it.

First, I had to gear up.  I still have my old film cameras (Nikkormat, Nikon 2000, Yashica Mat 124G) and I got fresh batteries to make them work again.  But I was intrigued by the availability of some classic film cameras that were beyond my reach when they (and I) were 30 years younger.  So I bought a 1956 Leica M3 and a Mamiya RB67 Pro SD.  Then I picked up a Graflex Graphic View II camera and finally a Graflex Speed Graphic.

Don't ask.

Here are a couple of photos of the gear:

First, the Leica -

The View Camera-

And finally the RB67-

Now, a few of my initial photos.  Nothing special, just playing around.

Here's an instant film shot from the RB on Fuji instant film.  Scanned on an Epson V700 and cleaned up in Photoshop to remove dust, etc.

That actually came out a lot better than I expected, although the instant film is very soft and had to be sharpened up in PS.

Here are a couple of shots taken with the Leica and the Nikon on old, expired film.

I was also pleased with these, but I had to clean them up some to remove excessive grain that resulted from the film being expired about 15 years ago.

I should pause here to talk about exposure.  The Leica and RB67 do not have built-in light meters, and frankly, I am a bit rusty using the old fashioned hand-held meters.  So I used a combination of a separate digital camera, an old Seiko light meter that seems not to be working very well any more, and a light meter app on my phone.  And guesswork.  After playing around with a lot of bad exposures, I realized that I just need to shoot more so that I get my intuition back.  Turns out the sunny 16 rule plus experience is pretty much all you need in most situations.  But I did pick up a newer, modern light meter from a friend to help me out.

Here are a few more shots I took just to finish off this entry.  More fun and details next time.

Video experiment

As promised, here is a link to my first attempt at a video production from the D800.  Recorded the guitar clip first, then a bunch of clips of the vocal.  I used Final Cut Pro to put it all together.

I'm still learning the program.  The interface is very similar to iMovie if you have a Mac, but it has a lot more options and the codec is much more sophisticated, producing 1080 quality HD video output.  I found it a bit tricky to overlay clips and stills and texture and video simultaneously, and I'm still working on that aspect.  This is just the basic shots with a black-white process overlaid with an 'old paper' texture.  Nothing fancy.  I can tell now that the audio is distorted, so I'll have to go back and output the file again with the audio track attenuated some.  Anyway, I am pleased at the promise of this new option for me.  Here is the result from YouTube - click the image to view the clip.

Long Portrait

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to try my hand at a "long portrait".  The LP is essentially just a video portrait.  The intent is to capture more of the subject than is possible in a 'flat' image.  I thought of this a couple of months ago, and then with a little research found out that some pro photographers had started using them.  Generally, they just do a 30-second clip, and frankly I was not impressed.  I really didn't feel that I was seeing anything extra in the video.  For that matter, the still image actually seems to convey more interest than those long portraits because it engages my imagination.  So when I thought about how to set up my version, I chose to set the mood with the lighting and expression of the model, and to set it to appropriate music.  Here is the result (click the image to view the video on YouTube):

I am pleased with the way this turned out.  I had some technical issues with the natural lighting and the depth of field, but the look of the portrait is very close to what I had imagined.  My goal was to create a thoughtful portrait.  The model, Renee, is actually a very bright and bubbly girl, so she took my direction very well.  I also had to come up the learning curve on Final Cut Pro X, which is no trivial thing in itself.  I am still learning what I can do with that program, and I'll probably do a revised version with fancier post processing at some point in the future.

And, as a bonus, because Renee is a singer as well, I took the opportunity to record a music video with her. So that will be coming at a later date.

Captain Video

So, since I have this fancy camera that can shoot HD video, I decided to give it a shot.  This past Saturday I spent a couple of hours with a beautiful young lady, having her pose for some stills and then do some video.  My original idea was to get a sort of (slightly) moving portrait that would communicate a bit more than a still. After getting myself all pumped up that I had discovered a new artistic angle, I consulted my go-to reference work (the Interweb) and found out (gasp!) somebody else already thought of it.  It's called a "long portrait" and there are some pros out there who have been doing it for a while, apparently.  But rather than sulking about it, I decided there's no reason I shouldn't try my hand.  So I did.  Once I finish editing the clips I'll post a link so you can tell me how I should stick to the still stuff.  In the meantime, here are a couple of shots of the model, processed of course.  She was great to work with and I think she had a lot of fun.  In any case she's a good sport to allow me to mangle her visage to suit my warped photo styling muse.

Saving a photo

Sometimes things don't go well when you are shooting.  But that doesn't mean you can't dig out a decent photo from a lost cause snap.   Here is an example.

I took this shot of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse on a dreary day in the late afternoon under less than interesting lighting conditions.  As you can see, the colors are all washed out, and even though I tried very hard to set up something interesting with the local foliage, it just wasn't working.

I actually sort of wrote this one off, until I had a happy accident one day.  I was playing around with some black and white conversion workflows, and selected this photo as an object to test.  Since it was originally shot in raw format, I opened the image in ACR and started playing with it.  I was attempting to set the max and min black and white levels appropriately, when I accidentally grabbed the exposure slider and pushed it down toward under exposure.  That's when the magic happened.  It turns out that there was a lot of sky color hidden in the file, and underexposure let it show through.  I could have played around with the vibrance and saturation on the original and tried to save it, but that would have introduced too much false color, and really I don't think the result would have been pleasing.  But pushing the exposure down a couple of stops actually converted this into a totally different type of photo, with very pleasing results.  Here's the final after a little sharpening and cropping:

I think this is a nice, dramatic rendering that appears to be a twilight shot even though the photo was taken in the afternoon, facing generally east toward the ocean, away from the sun.

So, a couple of lessons here.  First, shoot in raw - it gives you many more options in post.  Second, look at your failures a second time, and see if there might be a way to save them.  This shot made Flickr explore, and you can see the larger version here.

Do you really need 36 megapixels?

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

How's that for being definitive?  I think I have pretty much covered all the bases there, don't you?

I recently purchased a Nikon D800.  While I do make money from photography, I don't make a living with it so acquiring a 36 megapixel camera is a bit of a stretch for me.  Certainly one does not need that much resolution to make a good photo.  My Olympus PEN E-P3 does just fine in most situations, and it is a micro four-thirds format.  It's only about 12 MP, so that would actually be a little small for making big prints, but otherwise it works fine, especially if you can control the lighting.  It's easy to carry and you can attach high quality lenses to it.

My other cameras have always been APS-C sensors, with about 12 MP resolution.  The larger pixels are better than the micro 4/3 sensor in the Olympus, but not as good as full frame, nor do they have the low noise/high ISO performance of the 16 MP Nikon D7000.

When I decided to move up, I had basically three choices, given that I have so much nice Nikon glass already:  (1) used or new D700, (2) D800, and (3) D4.  I never really considered a D3.

I like the D700, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth and I didn't want to remain behind the technology curve.  The D800 is a bit pricey, but at $3k not totally out of reach for a serious semi-pro.  All my research on image quality tells me that the D4 is the way to go, but at 2X the price of the D800, I just can't justify it.

So, I settled on the D800, even though I had some reservations about the file sizes:  RAW files uncompressed on the D800 are about 77 MB.  My aging iMac had to be taken into account.

Anyway, after searching to find a vendor who actually had a D800 to sell, I finally got it a few days ago and took a few random shots to see how it performed.  I was not disappointed, and I'll show you why.

Here is a full frame jpg at 72 dpi converted from the original photo I took using the D800 with a Nikon 50mm f/1.4 @ f/2.5, 1/160 sec, ISO 1250.  

Here is a crop from the center of the frame, at 120 dpi.

And here is a further crop, still at 120 dpi.  You can see a larger version on the flickr page, here.

So, what's the deal?  Ok, here is what I have seen so far.   The raw images are simply wonderful.  I suspect the noise in the image, which can in fact be seen when you crop down this much, is not as good as a top of the line D4 or Canon 5D MkIII, although I can't really compare myself.  But the noise is very tiny and adds a slight, fine-grain look so it's not objectionable at all.  This photo was shot in relatively dim room light, and so I am very impressed.

Did I need a 36MP camera to make these photos?  Maybe not.  Probably the D7000 might have given the same low-light images in this instance.  But there is something important that the high resolution sensor gives me, and that is....HIGH RESOLUTION.

See, I don't want to go out and buy another $5k of lenses, and this camera pretty much requires nice primes to fully appreciate the tiny pixels.  So, I can, as in this instance, use a 50mm lens and crop down pretty much to my heart's desire and still get good images.

For those who like to display their work in large format, printing 400ppi or 500ppi with these large files is possible, when utilizing an APS-C sensor would probably not be.

The price point on the camera is really a huge selling point.  Lots of D700s, hardly used, are showing up on eBay for about $1800 now, often with the battery grip and a lens, as D700 users upgrade to the D800.  Once the D800s really start shipping, I suspect the D700s will be much easier to pick up.  But it won't give you this resolution.

All in all, it's a spectacular opportunity.