Providence Canyon, 8x10 style

Yes, I'm still alive, if anyone was wondering!

I've been swamped with "real life" lately, working on a great number of projects, both personal and professional, as well as starting up my summer job that I have done every summer for 8 years now (working at an instrument repair shop.

Anyway, as I mentioned last post, all last week I was out of town in various locations. My first stop was Providence Canyon. I decided to lug my 8x10 all over this canyon system because I wanted to try a new lens primarily, but also because I'm crazy. My load was somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 pounds or more.

Well all that and I only took two shots. But they came out really well. When I get a chance I'll be contact printing both of these. So I also took my nice shiny new D800E as well. I didn't really take a single outstanding shot on the D800E. As much as I try, I just can't quite gel with digital shooting landscapes. I think the tactile experience of shooting a large format camera, along with the act of composing the image on a huge piece of glass, just works for me better.

Here are the shots. The first is taken with a 210mm f/9 Graphic Kowa lens that I just picked up. I really like this lens as this is my favorite focal length on 4x5 (kind of like a 28mm on 35mm cameras). The second is also with a newer lens that I got at a great price, a Nikkor 120mm f/8. This is a super-wide (equivalent to 17mm) lens. Both were shot with some HP5+ film I was given. I have seen some photos from HP5 before and I've never liked them. I still don't like the film really after shooting these but it's not too objectionable, especially since they'll be contact printed. I simply don't like the clumpy grain structure. I must admit it scanned very well though:

More images from the rest of my trips will be incoming shortly, so stay tuned...

Withlacoochee Project Part 3

It's been too long since my last post. I've been exceedingly busy, too busy to shoot much, but Saturday I will be up in the north GA mountains for a week, so I hope to have many images to share afterward.

But before that, here are three more 8x10 images from the Withlacoochee River that were finished up recently. The first image was shot with the Nikon 300mm f/9 lens while the other two were with the Gundlach Radar 300mm f/4.5. As you can see I'm still occasionally having lots of problems with banding on my scans. One of these days I need to get that scanner open and clean it.

New lens for the Nikon SP

Enough of that digital junk, back to film stuff (that's a joke!).

After two months I finally received a lens I ordered from overseas for my Nikon SP. The Nikon uses a slightly modified Contax mount; therefore, many legacy Contax lenses will work on it, especially wide angles. I have always missed the 35mm focal length on the SP so I found a Russian-made Jupiter-12 lens on eBay.

These lenses are copies of the Zeiss Biogon design. Most folks say the quality-control is suspect and many are excellent but some are dogs. I'm not quite sure about mine. It has positively awful corner performance, even at f/5.6. However, the lens has amazing micro-contrast that really makes the photos look "3D." I might just have to crop everything to a 4:5 ratio and call it a day. I will have to do more tests with it stopped down to f/11 or more. I'm not sure if it's curvature of field causing the poor performance or just a dog of a lens.

Anyway, here are some snapshots from the lens taken on old Kodak Gold 100 film. I converted a couple to b&w because the colors were yucky:

Startrails at VSU with the Nikon D800E

More digital images? What is the world coming to? Alas, I am very much enjoying using the D800E for some casual shooting. Long-exposure astrophotography is another hobby of mine that I haven't been able to do in a while so I thought I'd take the D800E out for a spin to try it out.

Even with longer exposures the files look great. I didn't even use a darkframe. This is just a test shot as I want to do a longer exposure later this week.

Taken with a 17-35mm f/2.8 lens at 19mm, f/7.1, and ISO 100. This is a composite of 70 30-second exposures:

Some test images from my new Nikon D800E

This blog is mostly about shooting film, but even so I do shoot a lot of digital images, usually when I'm doing event photography or portraiture. The new Nikon D800E is an exciting development in camera design, which I decided to invest in to have two cameras for gigs.

I had just enough time to snap a few shots around the Azalea Trail near VSU yesterday. I shot an event last night but haven't really worked on those images. Here are just a couple photos to illustrate the excellent quality of the D800E. All were taken with either a 55mm Micro or 17-35mm zoom. You can open these up as full 3000px files if you want to really look at the captured detail. Of course the original files are over 7000px long but I didn't really want full-rez copies on here.

My first impressions on the D800E are excellent. The dynamic range on this camera is indeed phenomenal as many tests have alluded. The ISO performance bests my D700 at the same magnification ratio, with more detail. The high-ISO performance over 3200 can get noisy at 100% but so can any camera. It's a feat of engineering that it looks as good as it does at 36mp. Color accuracy outdoors was fantastic.

At the event I shot last night I did notice some strange green-tinting on some shots. Some folks have claimed the LCD is tinted green. From my experiences outdoors, I saw absolutely no problem. In doors, under ugly fluorescent lights, there was definitely a green tint. The question was whether it was the white-balance being wrong or the LCD looking wrong. From my examination of the files on my color-corrected monitor, it's about an even split between the two. It seems that the camera does default to a slightly green WB (even with flashes), and the LCD under those fluorescent bulbs looks even greener. So I set the WB 2 clicks towards magenta and it was fine. I will have to do more checking though. Regardless, the auto WB seemed much better than my D700, which I always felt was a little weak.

As predicted, deficiencies in lenses and shooting technique show up easily in 36mp. The mirror seems to be well dampened in this camera but even so it caused movement sometimes.  Handheld at 1/60 or lower is harder than on my D700, but I'm not used to the feeling of that mirror so it might change.

There are many little additions and improvements that are really nice, #1 on my list being the 2-axis level built in to the camera. What a joy to be able to level both horizontally and vertically! My only gripe is that the Mode button was replaced with the movie record button, and the Mode button moved to slightly left of that. It is just barely in easy reach with my long fingers. I wish they would have put the movie record button in the new spot instead. But that's not too big of a deal.

Overall I'm very pleased!