I mentioned in a few posts about my day job, and how much I enjoy it – one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is the flexibility I have to take long lunches. I did so today just before class, and got two rolls worth of film on just the direct route from my office to Subway and back to my class building. Yes, it’s film so I don’t have anything to show you yet, but this is the start of that “sights of UNC” project I was thinking about a while back – a black and white film perspective of the UNC Chapel Hill campus and the changing seasons thereof. Of course, I’m backlogged on developing by about 6 rolls, before the two I shot today… heh. Maybe I should develop some film tonight, you think?
Archive for March, 2009
Film explorations
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Coming up for breath…
Monday, March 23rd, 2009It’s been a while since my last post – I’ve been busier than anything with my job and with the class I’m taking. Fortunately, the class is going really well – I’m doing better than I expected to be doing, even if I’m not doing quite as well as I really want to be doing. It’s amazing how much adjustment there is in going back to school, even part-time – heck, even just one class per semester as a benefit of working for a University – after over 12 years of being out. I’ve got a lot of advantages over the regular undergrad students I’m in classes with (I’m using undergrad classes to prove I have the mojo to take on a few grad classes which I’ll use to get into grad school), but what I didn’t expect was just how many disadvantages I have.
But that’s neither here nor there – the class is going well, and I’m really enjoying it, but this blog is about photography, not classwork or my job or other uninteresting stuff. Last weekend I updates SCG with Savannah’s shoot – Savannah is a wonderful model, with more experience in her big toe than I have in total, and you can tell she definitely knows what poses make for good images. Here’s one that I especially like:
Sleeper
The weather was absolutely piss-poor when we shot together, so I couldn’t get any nice outdoor shots, and I still haven’t figured everything on the Pentax out to get higher quality indoor film B&W shots, so no film from Savannah’s shoot.
But I did finish scanning in the B&W from Stephanie’s shoot, and some of those images are (IMHO) absolutely gorgeous. Here’s just one example:
Zoom? ZOOM!
The small image here looks good, but it loses the graininess of the full-size scan, which is what I really like about these images. Maybe I’m a throwback, but damn I like the effects of grain I’ve been getting from this film!
More film!
Thursday, March 12th, 2009Just finished converting some raw film scans through Photoshop. These are from the shoot I did with Kelli Vicious – the film was Kodak 400TX this time (as opposed 320TXP for Nicole’s shoot), the developer was still Ilford Ilfotec DDX. Notice the contrastiness of the image as a whole, yet it doesn’t break down into hard outlines:
The Sign
My second roll came out even more boldly differentiated – much contrastier. I think that was partly due to the changes I made in exposure settings (mostly apeture):
Doorway
And a final example:
Woodpile
New scans!
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009So I finally got my entire film workflow set back up a few nights ago and I’ve been developing and scanning negatives in a mad rush. The part that took the longest was finding decent scanning software – Epson makes great scanners, but their software is rather broken. I finally discovered that Mac OS X’s Image Capture utility does exactly what I need it to, then I hand off to Photoshop for conversion and rendering (just like I do with digital camera files).
So the negatives I have scanned in now are from the shoot I did with Nicole Marie a month or so ago. I used Kodak 320TXP film in a Pentax 645 medium format camera, developed in Ilford Iflotec DDX developer. Here’s one example:
Sitting Pretty
I still love the feel of film. The image looks so much more natural and realistic to me somehow than the digital images. I did have some unintentional developing issues, I think because it’s been so long since I’ve done true black and white film development and I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have. Some of them gave my negatives some effects which I thought were really cool – it gave them a very “old-timey” feel – vintage photographs, deteriorating but salvageable negatives from days gone by. Here’s an example of the effect I’m talking about:
Smile
Notice the graininess over the whole image, the fading at the top and bottom of the image it’s just really cool, IMHO.
More images yet to scan, and more rolls of film yet to develop… Back later!
Busy days behind and ahead
Monday, March 9th, 2009Wow, was last week ever busy. I think I had all of 2 hours to myself, between work, class, and random errands I had to run. It was slightly insane.
Of course, this led to my biweekly SCG update not happening on time, since it was supposed to happen on Friday. This actually turned out to be a good thing, since I got to do a second shoot with this week’s model, Stephanie, this time at Hanging Rock State Park. The Upper Cascades falls is an absolutely gorgeous area, and putting a good looking woman into the pool area below the falls was just the touch it needed.
While we were there, a group of four local girls asked Stephanie if she was a model, so it must have been fairly obvious what we were doing – it’s not every day you see a good looking woman in a bikini wading into really cold water chatting it up with a guy in a journalist’s vest and two cameras around his neck. 
Go check out Stephanie’s new page – the shots from Hanging Rock are at the bottom of the gallery. The trip was exhausting, but well worth it! Here’s a sample of what we got:
Enjoying the waterfall pool
New stuff
Sunday, March 1st, 2009Just finished another shoot today, with Mia Nicole from ModelMayhem. I’ll definitely need to have her come back out here later in the spring or summer so we can get some outdoor shots – the weather today was such complete crud that I half didn’t want to even wake up. We got some good stuff, but I think we can get somemuch better stuff once I get her outside in good weather!
