[bobbotron]

Finally developed a roll I shot on my petri racer last fall. Not a lot of detail in the shots I scanned tonight but I like the tones.





Edit: One more, Flavours of the Caribbean restaurant. The best Caribbean food in Ottawa!

---

Last edited by bobbotron; 03-18-2016 at 07:59 AM.

[ivrabec985]

Hello,
Here are some photos from one birthday and some random walk through the city...

Pentax K1000
Delta 3200
SMC Pentax 50mm F1.2

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[bobbotron]

Hello,
Here are some photos from one birthday and some random walk through the city...

Pentax K1000
Delta 3200
SMC Pentax 50mm F1.2

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

[/url][/img]

That 3200 came out really nice! It's often grainier when I try to scan it. Great photos!

---------- Post added 03-20-16 at 05:10 PM ----------

Two more from the Petri.

[ivrabec985]

yes, that's some heavy grain. i was afraid that i was doing something wrong but i have red that it's because of rodinal.
people say it's less grainer when developed in xtol. how do you develop delta 3200?

[pathdoc]

First stumbling steps. Feel free to criticise; any flaws are a combination of poor photographic technique (inexperienced with the nuances of B&W and struggling to get to know the camera) and inexperience with developing. Any greatness is, I must honestly admit, a combination of the errors cancelling out.

All the shots were digitised by shooting the developed film in an Asahi Pentax slide copier with my K-5 and a 35mm macro lens, and the EXIFs must of course not be taken as being representative of actual settings. The entire roll was shot in a Honeywell Spotmatic with a combination of SMC Tak 55/2.0 and Super Tak 50/1.4 (radioactive) and a modern 1.5V cell powering the meter. Film was Tmax 100. Development was with D76, water stop bath and Kodak fixative.

In the interests of presenting an "honest" effort, no post-processing has been applied. The camera settings were monochrome WB and inversion filter to produce instant positives. The negs were shot in Av mode against a background of snow.





This one above was shot with extension tubes.

[mattt]

Ektar 100 converted greyscale because as much as the red sandstone was colourful, in the flat light it had no punch. I shot most of the day in manual with ME Super and M 28/3.5. After a few dozen rolls, Colten's scanning tutorial i think i'm finally getting scanning down.

[bobbotron]

yes, that's some heavy grain. i was afraid that i was doing something wrong but i have red that it's because of rodinal.
people say it's less grainer when developed in xtol. how do you develop delta 3200?

I've developed it in DD-X, with similar results. I've always really wanted to like the film, but I've pretty much given up on it, especially in 35mm unless I really want to make some grainy photos. I like the results some people get with it, but man it's unforgiving if you underexpose it. If I want to take film photos in the dark, I instead now like to break out a tripod and use slower film, or use a flash.

This was taken with Delta 3200, shot and processed at 1600 in DD-X, using bounce flash.


This is also 3200, shot at 3200. I really like the grain here.


Just to be clear, the two photos in my post above were a different train of though, I think it might have looked like I was saying they were also delta3200. That was Rollei Retro 400s, where I've intentionally crushed all the middle tones.

[Jonathan Mac]

First stumbling steps. Feel free to criticise; any flaws are a combination of poor photographic technique (inexperienced with the nuances of B&W and struggling to get to know the camera) and inexperience with developing. Any greatness is, I must honestly admit, a combination of the errors cancelling out.

All the shots were digitised by shooting the developed film in an Asahi Pentax slide copier with my K-5 and a 35mm macro lens, and the EXIFs must of course not be taken as being representative of actual settings. The entire roll was shot in a Honeywell Spotmatic with a combination of SMC Tak 55/2.0 and Super Tak 50/1.4 (radioactive) and a modern 1.5V cell powering the meter. Film was Tmax 100. Development was with D76, water stop bath and Kodak fixative.

In the interests of presenting an "honest" effort, no post-processing has been applied. The camera settings were monochrome WB and inversion filter to produce instant positives. The negs were shot in Av mode against a background of snow.





This one above was shot with extension tubes.

Not a criticism as such but I "scan" my B&W negatives in a similar way and I find that the RAW files need a significant adjustment to highlights/mid-tone/shadow to get them looking good. Straight out of the camera they are too bright and flat-looking and I see the same qualities here. This does depend on the film somewhat too and exposure. Of course, you state yourself that you didn't apply any PP but with this copying method I'd say PP is essential.

If your K5 has the option to process the jpeg into a negative image (the K3 has that option) then I'd suggest using that as it's very useful to be able to get a better idea of how the final image will look.

Here's an older example from when I first started copying in this way but didn't apply the PP I do now (T-Max 400, shot at 200):


IMGP1187a by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr

And compare that to a more recent scan which I adjusted to taste and am much more happy with (T-Max 100 at 80):


T-Max 100 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr

[pathdoc]

Not a criticism as such but I "scan" my B&W negatives in a similar way and I find that the RAW files need a significant adjustment to highlights/mid-tone/shadow to get them looking good. Straight out of the camera they are too bright and flat-looking and I see the same qualities here. This does depend on the film somewhat too and exposure. Of course, you state yourself that you didn't apply any PP but with this copying method I'd say PP is essential.

If your K5 has the option to process the jpeg into a negative image (the K3 has that option) then I'd suggest using that as it's very useful to be able to get a better idea of how the final image will look.

Decisions, decisions. The option of shooting raw and post-processing afterwards did occur, but this was the first roll and the first time trying this scanning method with B&W film, and my first thought was therefore to get the images into digital form ASAP as a proof of concept thing. Now that I know it can be done, I can work on refinements.

As I said, I captured the images with the "inverted" filter switched on in the camera, so the negatives I shot were being turned into positives and being put straight out onto the card that way; all I would have to do to get a negative image is turn that filter off. I also shot in monochrome for obvious reasons (if there was a colour cast, I didn't want it showing). I acknowledge it makes sense to simply capture the "straight" negative image and do the PP on a machine that has far more power than my DSLR, and in the long term this is what I will probably do, but for cheerful happy snaps this method seems to work for now.

Right now the bigger issue is finding a way to stand the slide copier off from the lens just a little more so that the entire frame gets captured. Unfortunately the slide copier and my bellows are ever so slightly different in their era despite both being Pentax, and do not fit together, so some sort of workaround is going to have to be made before I can use one of my Takumars to do the image capture. But I think I have an idea in that respect, so all is good.

[mattt]

beyond the "honesty of no PP" - another thing to consider is printing before digital gave the photo finisher tools to darken / tweak exposures - from various grades of paper, to dodging and burning while exposing the paper.

Go ahead, and use the whole histogram

[pathdoc]

another thing to consider is printing before digital gave the photo finisher tools to darken / tweak exposures - from various grades of paper, to dodging and burning while exposing the paper.

Go ahead, and use the whole histogram

True, but when I'm looking for constructive criticism or assistance, I would rather give people the closest thing to raw data I can. This way, all that's standing between you and the negatives are the inverting and monochrome filters built into the K-5. Posting them as I did brought the comments that Jonathan Mac made about the way he used to do things, which has set where I am now firmly in context. I know that what I got out of the camera is what I ought to be getting, which is reassuring.

It's quite clear that further efforts will need tweaking to look good, but it doesn't bother me as much to do that when coming from a film negative as when shooting straight digital (at least if it's only brightness and contrast tweaks). While I know that film development was never a "straight" process and much tweaking was involved at the print stage, the degree to which this is often done in PS today rather horrifies me; to me there's a line between making a photograph and creating an artwork, and that line is too often crossed. Photoshop is dead to me for that reason; I much prefer a simpler program that cannot twist the truth so much.

[dsmithhfx]

all that's standing between you and the negatives are the inverting and monochrome filters built into the K-5

Are you asking people to assess the technical quality of your negatives? This can only be done by examining them on a light table with a loupe.

[pathdoc]

Are you asking people to assess the technical quality of your negatives?

No, I'm not; I'm asking them to assess the image output.

Any black and white film image that gets posted here is necessarily a function of the exposure (including focus), development (dev,stop,fix) and digitisation processes acting sequentially, and critique of the image is in fact a critique of the entire process. Jonathan Mac's answer (qv) was informative and helpful. I happened to share his opinion regarding the brightness and flatness of the images before I even posted them here, but did not know what it meant. Now that I know it seems to be (at least in part) a product of the digitisation method, I can start thinking about how to fix it.

[dsmithhfx]

a simpler program that cannot twist the truth so much

All this means in practice is that you are relinquishing control over crucial aspects of the correction process to algorithms pre-cooked into the 'black box' that is your "simpler" program.

[mattt]

An age old discourse... eschew the technology because your preference is to disfavor the artistic product of others.

There was a time at photography's inception that it was not accepted as art.. In fact... "In my opinion photography has not benefited art at all" - William Firth

The irony here is that the painters of the day were modernists complaining about the reality of photography, and in effect Pathdoc is complaining about the surreal results one can achieve with photoshop. And to be fair, I prefer a more conservative treatment, even in my HDR work. I hope you do not think I'm picking on you my fellow Canadian, rather shining a light on the paradox for further consideration.