Drexel Park in the Fall

Today I went on a short walk at Drexel Park. Drexel is adjacent to the VSU/Valdosta High Stadium, and is often a venue for cookouts, college events, and recreation. It is not a huge park but it does have some nice scenery and plenty of greenery. It is also within the "Azalea Trail," a trail that goes through the Valdosta State campus and into a small paved path behind the parking lot on Sustella.

One of the interesting aspects of Drexel are these huge bushes of reeds. I have always found them interesting and decided to take two shots of them today:

First is this image. It was shot on my Zone VI Wista 4x5 camera with a 90mm lens (Schneider SA 90mm f/8). This lens is equivalent to about a 28mm lens on 35mm. The aperture was f/16 and the exposure was 10 seconds.

This next image was shot with the Schneider 58mm XL f/5.6 lens at f/16 for 8 seconds. It is cropped slightly.

Both images were shot on Kodak T-Max 100 film, a 100-speed film with superb resolution and tonality. It is my favorite black & white film, though it can be tricky to develop. I used an N-1 development on the second shot to try to tame the highlights (for info on the Zone System, read Ansel Adams' "The Negative").

You might notice they are both a bit brown colored. This is a split-toning effect done in Photoshop to simulate a darkroom toning. I have not yet acquired the materials to do darkroom toning but I would like to soon.

Both images (and all 4x5 images for the foreseeable future) were scanned on an Agfa T2500 pre-production scanner at 4000DPI and edited in CS5. I might discuss this gem of a scanner at a later date.

Finally, I would like to post two more images from Drexel Park that I took about a week ago. Both of these were taken as tests with a new lens, a Wollensak Verito 11.5-inch f/4 Diffuse Focus lens. This lens is from the early 20th century! It is a "diffuse" focus lens, meaning at wide apertures the lens is very soft and looks like it has gauze over the lens, a very interesting and beautiful effect. 

The lens has a rudimentary shutter that is operated by a pneumatic release. It basically goes as fast as I can squeeze the bulb - not scientific but it works! Both of these are wide-open at f/4 and about 1-second exposures. I developed them in Pyrocat-HD, a compensating developer that can tame a negative which has been overexposed, which is easy to do with such a basic shutter.

That's it for Drexel Park today, but I will probably be back soon.