CalArti

I haven’t been out shooting wildflowers this spring, but I found a directory of shots from the spring of 2009 that I never got around to posting. So here is the first installment (there will be a few more.)

These are all early spring hepatica. Most of these were taking in Berrien County, Michigan. The last couple of shots were taking in the Allegan forest. The dime gives an idea of the size of these blooms.

These were all taken in the early days of April, 2009.

Here’s a snapshot of the Chicago skyline in the early morning, as taken from a hotel room last year. I re-worked the photo, previously posted here, in Photomatix. I really like the results on this morning photo, but oddly, Photomatix didn’t help the night shot at all.

I don’t expect that I’ll have much opportunity to photograph wildflowers this spring, so I thought I’d post a some older shots form a few years ago. I recently upgraded my medium format scanner from an Epson v500 flatbed to a dedicated Nikon 8000 ED, and have been rescanning some medium format images. Here are three shots of a spring woods with trillium in bloom. I don’t remember when I took these shots (I guess 2006 or 2007) but they were scanned this year and re-worked.

Here are a few more snapshots from Chestertown, Maryland. All of these are, again, digital infrared tone mapped images.

First off - another fine old home:

And here is the old Courthouse near the center of town:

Emmanuel Episcopal Church - another very old landmark in the center of town:

Don’t have the precise name of this, but it was a Methodist Church near the downtown area:

Lastly, a commercial building, somewhere in town. I like the nice clean lines of these old brick buildings:

Next - Chesapeake City, MD!

World pinhole day would have been last Sunday, April 24, but since that was Easter the folks how run the contest extended the time period by several days. (More about world pinhole day at http://www.pinholeday.org/)

Here’s my entry:

Of course, that is the South Haven lighthouse on the Lake Michigan Shore.

This was taken with my trusty Pentax 6x7 medium format camera with a pinhole body cap. The film used was some very old (and very expired) Kodak E100V transparency (slide) film.

I’m always trying to learn new things, so here are a few things I learned with this project:

1. The pinhole body cap does not form an entirely light proof seal against the camera body. In this shot you can see a mild light leak in the arching light areas to the left of the lighthouse. In some shots the light leaks totally whiles out the exposure. OK - I’m sure I was careless in how I mounted the body cap in a few cases, but I’m not sure if the body cap mounted on the camera is lightproof. (And then I wonder… why *should* a body cap be light proof, eh?)

I’ll be testing that…

2. The Kodak E100V had expired in 2004, but here we are, 7 years later, and it performed fine. It was stored in a deep freeze so that probably helped. I’ll be less worried about expired film going forward (good news since I have a freezer full of expired film…)

And BTW - I wouldn’t recommend slide film for any pinhole work, unless you can really get your exposure precise. I just really wanted to get rid of this film after looking at it in the freezer for the past 8 years, so I crossed my fingers and bracketed…

One of the most relaxing days on our vacation was visiting Maryland’s eastern shore, and a visit to Chestertown was the highlight of that excursion. Chestertown is rich in history and architecture, and the downtown shopping district is home many interesting shops. (You can learn more about the town here.)

Here is a fine old Georgian (I think) style home located on the waterfront - again, digital infrared with a little hand coloring on the shrubs:

Here’s a shot looking back at the city from the waterfront:

Another landmark - the Imperial Hotel, which is located on High Street near the center of the city:

Lastly - The fountain in the fountain in the center of the city park:

More shots will be coming.

Earlier this month I received news that one of my photos had been accepted into the West Michigan Area Show at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art. Frequent visitors will recognize In Indiana - a digital infrared shot taken last summer just outside of Tipton, Indiana. I dropped off the piece last Thursday, and plan to attend the opening reception next Friday, May 6. More about the Area Show and the KIA can be found here.

Just a quick snap shot from the Allegan Forest - a peek at the wildlife refuge, taken from the gate leading near Swan Creek. A while back I added a lensbaby muse to my small slection of Pentax 6x7 lenses - some fun, that lens. Agfa APX 100 in Agfa Rodinal 1:50

Here are a few more photos from my visit to Washington DC a few weeks ago.

For starters - the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center:

Reminds me of Guild Heighliner…

All of these are taken with the infrared converted Pentax K10-d. I’ve found that the Photomatix software is great for processing digital IR shots, even when they are not HDR shots. The shot above was just a single exposure, taken with a custom white balance, run through Photomatix, and the processed in Photoshop (channel swapping and the usual dodging and burning / overall tone and contrast adjustments.) I like the effects that Photomatix adds…

Another shot - a statue outside of the National Archives - again, single exposure digital IR:

Under this statue is written “Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.” The dude in the statue looks formidable.

Lastly, here’s an actual HDR shot of the Lincoln Memorial. I took the exposure on a cloudy and overcast day, actually in a light rain, so the IR effect is very light and the contrast is extremely low. No way to tease any color out of this image - I resorted to the hand coloring technique earlier, here is a straight B&W:

As I mentioned ins post from a few days ago, I tried to take digital infrared images of the Capitol from the Washington Mall. It was mid morning, the building was back lit, and IR photography is unforgiving in some respects… So - I bracketed a few shots and walked over to the other side of the building. But I bracketed with the intent of trying to recoup some useful HRD images…

Pretty cool… Though a bit gaudy. This is an HDR compost of three bracketed digital infrared images (digitally converted Pentax K–10d) with channel mixing, layer blending, and a bunch of other digital manipulations. Super freak photography?

I liked that photo when I first made it, but putting it up on the wall after a while I realized it lacks - umm… subtlety. Here’s a photo of the Capitol that I like better - again HDR digital IR but rendered with a little less gaudiness:

ANd here’s a shot I like because it has trees in it (and as a rule, I like trees):

More HDR stuff - gaudy and not, IR and not, coming….

Hanging out of Second Avenue
Eating chicken vindaloo
I just want to be with you
I just want to have something to do
- Ramones

What to do on a rainy Saturday? Like a bored kindergartener, I contemplated my options yesterday… The answer I cam up with was to try developing film in coffee - caffenol - something I had read about but never tried.

Great - I grabbed my old film camera, Pentax MZ-S - and found that it had a roll of Fuji Neopan SS 100 already in it. Hmmm - 10 exposures taken, I had no idea when or where. Where, they obviously weren’t important and if coffee development could make Neopan SS acceptable, I was all for it.

I drove off to the local grocery store and bought some Arm and Hammer Washing power. Then I went to Walgreens and bought some Walgreen’s instant coffee, and then I went to the health food store and bought some pure powder vitamin C. There we have it - everything needed for caffenol C.

I then drove around for a while in the cold wind blown rain. The day was gloomy and dark. I finally drove through the graveyard just around the corner from my house and snapped out the remainder of the film roll there.

Here’s a shot of a monument from the graveyard, developed in the caffenol.

So, talking about developer, let’s talk a little about the philosophy behind making photos….

Photography is an endeavor that is marked by many scientific and technical aspirations. Over the centuries people have strived for the precisely correct exposure and the precisely correct development time. Oddly enough, for all this desire for precision photography itself is a very messy and imprecise business. For instance, the basic unit of measure - the Stop - is based on full orders of magnitude of difference. Imaging if you were a carpenter and you could only cut boards that were one foot, two feet, four, eight or sixteen feet in length and had no way to even tell that what length of board was really precisely right, and no way to actually cut something to a precise size. That 10 foot 3.5 inch board - ain’t gonna happen. Similary for the photographer, that exact exposure, down to the fraction of a stop, seldom happens and when it does it is by luck or the grace of God and not skill…

Developing film is the one and only area where some degree of precision is possible. You can indeed precisely control the concentration of developer and the starting temperature of your developer solution. You can control the time spent in development. And you can greatly influence the effects of agitation, though the actual action of the fluid in the canister is chaotic and subject to randomness. Since the effects of development are conditional on the exposure of the film, over which one has limited control, the degree of control exercised in the development phase is similarly limited.

So - when it comes to caffenol - am I doing this to try to create another very precise developer solution, or is this an exercise in injecting controlled randomness into film processing? Being a level head, non delusion type; I decided it was clearly the latter. I mean, if I really want to control the process why not just use Rodinol, HC 110, D76, or some other commercial developer?

Ok - so I followed the caffenol recipe on the massive developer chart, which you can find here. I varied the recipe a bit and used leftover coffee the morning’s pot as a base and added 1/2 tsp of table salt to the mix to reduce the grain in the Neopan SS. (I am not a big fan of the grain in this film - it is pronounced and uneven in most developers, and comes across as clumpy and uneven…)

The mixture smelled pretty bad, but then I have actually drunk coffee that smelt worse, so what the heck. No starting time for caffenol C was given on the website, so I went with 20 minutes at 20 C. I was a little surprised to find that the negs were a bit over developed, and iwll probably cut back on that time in the future.

Regarding tonal quality - the stain produced by the coffee is notable in the film. Thankfully, it offsets the magenta tint that Neopan SS is infamous for. The contrast is rather flat in the mid range but more pronounced at the ends of the spectrum - resulting in both the highlights being a little too bright and the shadows a little too dark. The grain is OK but not great.

Here is an actual pixel crop of the scan - this is the hand on the crutch - the scan was made on a Nikon 8000 ED and a little sharpening has been applied. It clearly is not a high acutance developer…

This was an interesting experiment, and I might try some other plant based developers in the future. I view the use of caffenol as injecting a degree of randomness into the photographic process - not that there isn’t a lot of randomness in it already. But when you embrace the chaos and relinquish illusions of being in control, you get to have more fun…

At any rate, at least this gave me something to do yesterday…

Another shot from Washington D.C. - here’s a digital infrared photo of the Capitol Building. The photo shows the east side of the building - not much luck getting a backlit shot from the Mall. I have no idea why the place was so empty.

Since it was the start of the Cherry Blossom Festival I took a couple of snapshots of the Capitol Building with pretty cherry blossoms in the foreground - which are these: