Finally got the last of Kristen’s film scanned. The indoor images are way off-balance, so I only scanned four or five of them total – matter of fact, I left an entire roll unscanned because of it. I just didn’t have my shit together on lighting when I did that shoot, and it showed. The outdoor shots were great – natural lighting is awesome – the indoor shots on film ended up the next best thing to complete crap. I’m so glad I’ve gotten my shit together since then… also, the fact that I’m only using B&W film anymore really helps. I’ve got a roll of Daisy’s to scan, and then two rolls of Stephanie’s to develop and scan – all C-41 – then three rolls of 320TXP from my lunch walkabout on campus a week or two ago. Feel free to take a look at the new images at the end of Kristen’s full album (all images in that album untouched by Photoshop so don’t whine about the temperature or color distribution wonkiness).
Moving along…
April 4th, 2009There is always balance
April 4th, 2009The good: the car is now ready for the shoot tomorrow – just washed it inside and out, vacuumed, even wiped down the console. It’s what I call “date-ready”. The bad is that I don’t have a date – just the shoot tomorrow, which is most definitely not the same thing. Overall, it just balances out, ’cause it’s nice that the car looks good. The pollen was starting to build up a bit and the windshield needed a good going-over, on both sides.
I do have to apologize to the world for driving with the top up on day like this, though – unfortunately, I had to leave the top up to dry. 
New film!
April 4th, 2009Just got the first film shipment I bought on eBay – 21 rolls of 400 ISO Tri-X B&W 120 film. Can’t wait to start putting it through the camera!
Another late night
April 3rd, 2009Yes, it’s another night that I’m not sleeping – I woke up early this morning, didn’t nap when I got home, put in a full day at work, and yet I’m wide awake at 1:15 am. Well, at this point I suppose I should say yesterday morning, since today is tomorrow already.
I’ve got a lot going through my mind right now, which is probably a large part of why I’m imitating an insomniac – most of it things that can’t easily be broadcast. Heck, can’t easily be put into words – just random thoughts, walks down random future history paths… following the lines between the worlds of if.
I’ve always been introspective – it comes with my introverted nature, I think – and sometimes it comes out with a vengeance. This has been one of the weeks it’s come out to play. I can never figure out why it triggers, or what makes it go away, except in very rare very specialized situations. Maybe this is part of the reason I do photography – it’s a release of tension that I may not be aware of, or maybe a way of working out tension. Maybe it’s just a way of distracting my conscious mind while my unconscious works on a thorny issue. It seems to be, because I’ve always had the urge to drag the camera out and burn through film when I drop into these moods.
With luck, my new film should get here soon – I ordered two sets of film from eBay (won at auction, actually) – all B&W film. 320TXP, I think, though I’ll get reminded when I get the film, of course. I’ve also got two more rolls hanging up to dry, and have finished scanning one of the rolls I developed last night.
I think I need to try to get to sleep now, so I’ll leave you with a sample scan from the film I developed last night. This is from my shoot with Kristen Fesnak about a year ago (yes, it took my sad, sorry lazy butt that long to get around to developing the film).
Why am I awake?
April 1st, 2009Well, this is an absolutely ridiculous time for me to be posting. I should be asleep. I tried to go to sleep about 2 hours ago and couldn’t. I thought I was tired… I felt tired… now I just feel kind of blah.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had any time to develop and scan in my film backlog, so it’s still sitting there, looking at me, making me feel guilty for procrastinating. I really want to get those recent UNC images scanned, too! Gah… I’ll have to try and do this tomorrow – or at least start on it – I think once I manage to get myself started, I’ll be able to finish it up fairly rapidly. 6 rolls of C41 to process, three rolls of 320TXP.
In the meantime, I thought I’d pull out an old black and white scan of campus – this taken on Kodak Tmax 400 film in a Nikon N80QD with a 50mm f/1.2 lens set at about f/2, if I recall correctly.
The Pit
This is a view of the Pit and Student Stores circa 2004 as seen from an area between Lenior Dining Hall and Greenlaw Hall.
Film explorations
March 24th, 2009I 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?
Coming up for breath…
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!
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!
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
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
