This past Christmas, my siblings gifted me a gently-used Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI Micro lens. I have been wanting to fool around with a macro lens for awhile, but especially for the purpose of developing old negatives. I visited Costa Rica in 1997 and Germany in 1999, back before I'd even thought about digital capture, and while I doubt I got much in the way of good pictures, digitizing the film seems like a fun project.
My parents also have some old slides (what a trip through the way-back machine that's been!) that I figured I could digitize as well. My father was a photographer in his own right back in the day, and he lent me his lightbox to play around with. I have to see if I can get his old bellows to work with the lens (that would be a minor coup), but if so, I should be able to make some pretty solid prints.
My experience with Walmart's digital scans is pretty poor. They have a nice Fuji process for printing (which I prefer to Kodak's), but their scans are barely 1.5 megapixels and lack any sort of quality. While I can and have doctored the images in the Gimp, it's really not nearly as good as you can produce with a suitable negative development workflow.
03 January 2012
11 October 2011
Black and White Treatment
I've spent some portions of my time shooting limiting myself to black and white for sake of the effects. One of the images from Getty really worked out well for a bit of levels enhancement and a black and white treatment:
The image is low-contrast and relatively blurry in the original form—manually focusing at 400mm is tough given how thin the depth of field is. The birds on the posts are generally sharp, and the ones flying aren't.
The levels enhancement helps the contrast some, but it makes the image a little over done. Fortunately, a black and white treatment really helps:
All in all, I think it's quite an improvement—and the print of the black and white version was pretty terrific. One of my recent favorites, to be sure.
Compositionally it could probably be better (the dark spot in the upper left is a small overhang from a tree a few feet away), but it does handle rule of thirds fairly nicely I suppose. The blurriness of the image is actually somewhat attractive here, as it helps to distinguish the middle third from the bottom one. I'm undecided about whether the top third is compositionally useful or not—if not, a crop might serve better to fill things more adequately.
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| Before |
The levels enhancement helps the contrast some, but it makes the image a little over done. Fortunately, a black and white treatment really helps:
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| After |
Compositionally it could probably be better (the dark spot in the upper left is a small overhang from a tree a few feet away), but it does handle rule of thirds fairly nicely I suppose. The blurriness of the image is actually somewhat attractive here, as it helps to distinguish the middle third from the bottom one. I'm undecided about whether the top third is compositionally useful or not—if not, a crop might serve better to fill things more adequately.
05 October 2011
Gettysburg
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| Shooting with the 400 f/5.6. |
Took a trip to Gettysburg with friends this past weekend and really enjoyed a good shoot. The weather wasn't too good, and my inexperience with shooting film really showed, as I was unable to overcome some minor issues with the film feeder and probably lost two and a half rolls of film on the day.
My favorite shot that I took was from inside of a church at a Lutheran seminary there:
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| 85mm f/1.8 @ f/2, 1/100s, ISO 1600 |
The inside of the church was pretty dark but afforded some interesting views through the stained glass. I'd like to do some distortion correction, but I liked this one also:
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| 24mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8, 1/60s, ISO 800 |
The 400 did not see as much action, but I did take a few shots on the way to Spangler House:
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| 400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/3200s, ISO 1000 |
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| 400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/800s, ISO 1000 |
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| 400mm f/5.6 @ 5.6, 1/1250s, ISO 1000 |
All in all, a fun trip with good company. Hopefully there will be more. Two trips a year is not enough!
28 September 2011
More on Compression
To illustrate compression better, I've included the following pictures:
The one on the left is taken with the 85mm f/1.8. The one on the right is taken with the 400mm f/5.6. In this case, I tried pretty hard to keep them at the same size and fix the reference point (the brick column in the center of the background building).
The background in the second picture is much closer than it is in the first. In a way this makes perfect sense. What if we were going to focus on the background instead of the foreground? It stands to reason that the background would "feel" closer with the longer focal length (greater zoom).
The important thing to realize is that when we keep the foreground elements the same size (roughly), the background will seem closer with a longer focal length. In the first picture, I was perhaps six feet away from the subject. In the second picture, it was closer to thirty or forty feet. I would guess the background building is 500 feet or more away from the subject.
This, incidentally, is probably the way that we get some cool effects in Hollywood. I'm thinking specifically of this shot from Lord of the Rings:
In particular, note in the beginning of the clip how the background changes compression. What the filmmakers have done here is to rack the camera backward while zooming in. A tree appears in the foreground while the background appears to get closer. It creates just the sort of creepy experience you'd want when a Nazgul is about to appear.
The one on the left is taken with the 85mm f/1.8. The one on the right is taken with the 400mm f/5.6. In this case, I tried pretty hard to keep them at the same size and fix the reference point (the brick column in the center of the background building).
The background in the second picture is much closer than it is in the first. In a way this makes perfect sense. What if we were going to focus on the background instead of the foreground? It stands to reason that the background would "feel" closer with the longer focal length (greater zoom).
The important thing to realize is that when we keep the foreground elements the same size (roughly), the background will seem closer with a longer focal length. In the first picture, I was perhaps six feet away from the subject. In the second picture, it was closer to thirty or forty feet. I would guess the background building is 500 feet or more away from the subject.
This, incidentally, is probably the way that we get some cool effects in Hollywood. I'm thinking specifically of this shot from Lord of the Rings:
In particular, note in the beginning of the clip how the background changes compression. What the filmmakers have done here is to rack the camera backward while zooming in. A tree appears in the foreground while the background appears to get closer. It creates just the sort of creepy experience you'd want when a Nazgul is about to appear.
23 September 2011
Focal Length and Compression
It's been awhile since I've been writing here. This isn't because I haven't taken any pictures—it's because I have little time in my personal life to write much of anything, to say nothing of a photography blog.
However, I recently acquired a Nikkor 400mm f/5.6 AI-S and 85mm f/1.8 (AI'd). Manual focus isn't everyone's thing, but I have enjoyed it a fair amount, and these are focal lengths of some interest to me, and help to illustrate how the longer focal length tends to "compress" a scene.
Here's a picture from the 85:
While they're not super obvious, there are clearly buildings in the background some distance away. A somewhat equivalent picture from the 400:
I did not take the most extreme care to ensure that the scenes were identical, but hopefully the compression is fairly obvious. The background "feels" so much closer in this image than it does in the previous. This is due to the compression induced by the focal length. What this means is that the longer focal length (i.e., telephoto lens) tends to bring the background closer while the shorter focal length (i.e., wider angle) will present a scene with greater depth.
And just to make you jealous, a moon shot from the 400; it's cropped, run through unsharp, and has been color corrected some:
However, I recently acquired a Nikkor 400mm f/5.6 AI-S and 85mm f/1.8 (AI'd). Manual focus isn't everyone's thing, but I have enjoyed it a fair amount, and these are focal lengths of some interest to me, and help to illustrate how the longer focal length tends to "compress" a scene.
Here's a picture from the 85:
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| Fire hydrant? 85mm f/2.8, 1/5000s @ ISO 400 |
While they're not super obvious, there are clearly buildings in the background some distance away. A somewhat equivalent picture from the 400:
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| 400mm f/5.6, 1/1600s @ ISO 800 |
And just to make you jealous, a moon shot from the 400; it's cropped, run through unsharp, and has been color corrected some:
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| 400mm f/8, 1/1000s @ 800 ISO; hand-held |
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