A few more photos from the Withlacoochee and surrounding areas

I developed a roll of Sensia 35mm last night from the Withlacoochee flooding (as well as a quick jaunt to Grand Bay and Bank's Lank). Here are the photos, taken with my Nikon SP:

 

 

Flooding along the Flint River in Albany and Withlacoochee in Valdosta

We've had an unprecedented amount of rain here in south GA for the past several days. Currently most schools in the area are cancelled due to washed-out roads and other hazardous conditions. Most of Valdosta is a floodplain in fact! I took some documentary photos while in Albany playing in the symphony and Valdosta near the Withlacoochee - most of them with my Nikon SP rangefinder and 21, 35, 50, and 105mm lenses. I'm working on an article about T-Max developers and with this in mind, I shot these at ISO 100 and semi-stand developed them in standard T-Max developer (not RS) at a 1:40 dilution for 1 hour:

 

 

I also took just a few pictures with my Bessa RF 6x9 folder at the Withlacoochee. Film was T-Max rated at 100 and developed semi-stand in T-Max developer 1:32 for 1 hour:

 

Technical Pan 645 negatives and some cross-processed tungsten film

During my lunch break yesterday the weather was just beautiful so I went down to Langdale Park and shot two rolls of film. First was a roll of Technical Pan film that I shot with my Mamiya 645. This film is long gone and almost 15 years expired. I got a tip from a friend to try the highly dilute T-Max RS with this film as a replacement developer for Technidol. It worked wonderfully! Here are the results. The detail is mind-blowing. I'm really disappointed this film is no longer available!!

In addition, I was given a pack of 5 Kodak 160T chrome film. This is tungsten-balanced film. I know from experience that many tungsten films look pretty cool shot in normal daylight with no correction filter and then cross-processed. Here's a few of those photos:

Oh by the way, I officially have 11,000 views today! Awesome!

Strickland Mill Project - Demonstrating Perspective Correction

I wanted to share a single image today that I took actually quite a while ago to demonstrate what is possible with Photoshop in regards to Perspective Correction.

One of the most important reasons, beyond image quality, to use a large-format camera is the ability to use movements to correct perspective or increase apparent DOF. While they make lenses that do the same for current digital cameras, they are prohibitively expensive and of limited use.

For this shot I used an older 28mm f/2 AIS lens, carefully focused and shot on a tripod. I was tilting the camera up several degrees. The resultant image was that corrected in Photoshop:

Now, there is no free lunch. Performing this type of correction lowers the resolution of the image, and also requires you to crop in to the image depending on how much you correct. With the large 36-megapixel images from the D800E, this isn't as bad as it could be, but with my older D700 (12mp) it generally was a bad idea.

In a perfect world I'd rather have a lens that enabled movements, such as the 24mm PC-E lens from Nikon. Maybe someday. Alternatively, my large-format cameras work quite well for this, with even more lens options, so I'll probably just keep shooting those!

Strickland Mill Project - Printing my first 20x24 images

I'm dedicating this week to printing in the darkroom, and to start I've done my first two 20x24 prints. I finally was able to pick up some 20x24 trays as well as some NOS Ilford MGIV 20x24 paper (matte finish).

Here are two of the Mill images printed and hung to dry:

I've rigged up a large microphone stand to hold these bad boys along with clamps. I'm also trying to keep them from curling too much by inserting metal rods into the clamps to force them to stay straight. We'll see if it works. You can see the setup better in this full photo:

Evening walk at Grand Bay

Shot some E6 down at Grand Bay a couple of nights ago and got finished scanning it today. Here are a few of the images.

First, some really old Provia RDP II - it expired in the late 90's. I didn't know if it would work at all, but it did okay:

I also shot a roll of Astia in the Yashica. Still trying out this film since I have never shot it before: