Digital Snaps on the Azalea Trail

I keep looking back at the photos in the previous post. I really love the rendering on the film. However I wanted to try shooting it with digital to see if I could emulate that look.

I went out again to the Azalea Trail at the same time of day. Unfortunately just a few minutes into my trek it started pouring rain. So I only made a few snaps, none of which have the engaging light of last time. I must admit that the previous success may simply have been from the beautiful light filtering through wispy clouds last time. But either way, here's a few shots.

First is my favorite, a rare flower macro. I wanted to try out a new lens that I just got, a Nikon 80-200mm f/4.5 AI lens. This was shot with a Vivitar Close-up #1 Diopter to get focused close enough. I think this 35-year-old lens is pretty sharp!

I then took a few shots in b&w. These came out okay but the lighting was kind of flat. The worst part about digital is the highlights, and that was really the battle with these. I overexposed some of the film shots by quite a bit, intentionally, and the Rodinal really toned down the highlights and helped the quality of light to come through in the photo. Anyway, here are a couple of the b&w shots:

The sun peaked out for just about 10 seconds in the second photo, and it shows. Overall I'm not particularly inspired by any of these b&w shots. I still need to work on my technique when shooting them. I get okay results shooting in color and converting it later but I work better "in the field" when I'm thinking in b&w, and therefore shooting it as such. Much to experiment with in terms of settings!