Montgomery

Montgomery, originally uploaded by M Skaffari.

This is the first shot taken with Ekfe PL 100 M film.

Hard to say anything definite of the film from one shot, but it looks to have higher contrast than Ilford FP4+ and also bigger grain. I'll have to see some more shots to give better opinion about it.

Results from the night shoot

Osgood, originally uploaded by M Skaffari.

I scanned the negatives from a night shoot some days back. They look absolutely fantastic! The old Dogmar lens can't really take any highlights and all bright spots are beautifully haloed. The contrast is not too high and I actually increased the contrast in Photoshop after the scan. No other editing done.

I scanned at 6400DPI which resulted in 32000 * 25600 pixel (800mpix?) files so if someone needs a large print I have files to give ;)

Evening shoot

Today I dug my Graflex from the closet and headed out for a night shoot. I took several shots of different locations in downtown San Francisco. My goal was to capture the feeling on the streets in the night when there are not so many people around. I chose locations that didn't have restaurants or bars around them so guarantee the lack of pedestrians.

It's hard to gauge the exposure in the dark. I used my Canon 1D as reference light meter, but even then i approximated the needed exposure and bracketed the shots I really liked. I shot the whole evening with f/8 and exposure times between 2sec and 10sec. I'll try to get the films processed as soon as possible to see the results.

On one of the shots the film got stuck in the camera. I'm not sure id it holder was loaded wrong or how the film got out. I have the holder marked and need to see if that causes further problems.

1st image from my newly built 4x5 pinhole camera

Actually I'm working on more than just images. I promised to create pictures with a pinhole camera. I didn't have any handy so I had to go and build one.

The basic premise of a pinhole camera is easy.

1) Box that doesn't leak light
2) Light sensitive material (film or paper)
3) Very, very small hole to let some light in

I happen to have Polaroid 550 pack film holder and some Fuji FP-100B45 film for it at home so I decided to build a camera around that. How cool is it that you get instant pinhole shots from your hand crafted camera!

I build the camera out of black 3/8" foamcore board. It seems sturdy enough when constructed with plenty of glue and duck tape. The lens is made of a soda can where I made as small of a hole I could.

Only problem with the camera is actually not a problem with the camera, but the way I loaded the film into the holder. When loaded wrong, the tab that is used to pull out the instant film makes the pressure uneven on the film and creates the lighter line in the picture.

I'll fix this as soon as I get to a dark room. Tomorrow will be the day for pinhole photography!

Bragging

This has nothing to do with large format photography, but I got my picture published in New York Times. Well, it was published on their website, but I will count it anyway ;)

http://www.skaffari.fi/blog.html

Bay Bridge

Bay Bridge, originally uploaded by M Skaffari.

Finally got around scanning some of my large negatives. This turned out to be a bigger issue than I thought. I didn't consider the size of the images / files.

Scanning 4x5 inch negative at 6400dpi results in 1.23G TIFF file. That also results in ~ 70x90 inch print at 300dpi so maybe i'm scanning a bit too high resolution if i'm just putting the files in the internet. If I need to print the images I will just scan at desired size.

Otherwise I have to say I like the results for both paper image scanning and film scanning. I can recommend the Epson V700 to everybody.

Scanner ordered

I finally got myself to order the scanner I need. Epson V700. Should be here by Monday and then there will be more images in this blog. Maybe I'll start working more with film now.