Summer 2014 Roundup #2

Here's a few photos of the mill. Or rather what's left of it. They are crushing all of the remaining concrete and such and flattening the area. Very sad.

These are either with my Bessa R2S and 2.8cm lens on Tri-X, developed in T-Max developer, or Provia in my F4 with 25-50mm f/4 lens:

Summer 2014 Roundup #1

I've just been terrible about blogging lately. I'm in a total creative slump. It's been hard to get out to shoot, work is running me ragged, and to top it off I've had a few technical problems with my film development that gets me down.

I'm going to try to post a few photos every day or so for a bit to serve up some of the photos I've done lately. I just haven't posted hardly any of the photos that I have been taking.

So first up, here's two sheets I actually shot in late May but didn't get around to developing until this week. I didn't develop the E-6 then because I only had two sheets, so I waited till I shot more (I also needed fresh chemicals). You'll recognize the shots I duplicated in b&w on that post. Anyway, the first is on Velvia (the older 50-speed), the second on 100F and cropped to a 2x3 aspect ratio. The older film is getting a magenta shift but here I like the colors - looks like it was sunset time, though it wasn't.

Both were shot with the Zeiss 250mm f/5.6 Sonnar.

Withlacoochee back to normal...for now

The river area around Langdale Park is finally back to normal. The road is even dry and not washed out as it has been for the better part of a year. Of course, late summer 2013 is when the flooding started to happen, so this might not last.

I was able to hike back pretty far into the wilderness. The floodplains are just huge vats of mud. It's a little difficult to get around without slipping or sinking into some of these areas.

I took my Pentax 67 and 55mm f/4 and 105mm f/2.4 lenses out and shot these images:

 

 

 

Staining Developer Tests Continue

I don't know what it is, but staining developers just don't work well for me.

So many people extol the virtues of Pyrocat and other staining developers (and have great work to show for it) but I've never had much success. I must have some really alkali water or something, causing the high 1:1:100 dilution to falter.

I gave a different developer a chance though, called Tanol. It's a much lesser-known one. I'm even less happy with it right now. I developed a couple of films now with just awful results. Terrible base fog, almost no density at all either, and ridiculous edge effects making the film look hyper-sharpened and ugly.

I think the edge effects might do better with larger format films (I was shooting 35mm) but I'm going to have to rate ISO 400 films at like 50-100 considering the low density! And develop it for an hour with semi-stand. Well, that's the next test, anyway. I actually developed one set of 4x5 negatives with this stuff and they turned out okay. Still looking for the best 400-speed film in 35mm for scenic, outdoor stuff. Tri-X is just too grainy for me and I continue to be kind of "meh" to T-Max 400 for some reason.

Anyway, here's a couple of the "passable" frames:

 

Banks Lake - Summer 2014

I went to Banks Lake over Memorial Day weekend to get some fresh air. Sadly it's definitely summer here in Valdosta and it is hot. Also, yellow flies are abundant, as are of course the mosquitoes. Oh well. Anyway, I took a few photos, with my Linhof Master Technika and either 75mm f/4.5 Zeiss Biogon or 250mm f/5.6 Zeiss Sonnar. I wanted to test some T-Max 100 film that got water damaged when my refrigerator got turned off for a week last year. Only one of the damaged sheets showed obvious staining, while the rest seemed okay. So at least I can use the film for messing around and don't have to just trash it, as it was about 30 sheets.

Zeiss 75mm f/4.5 Biogon @f/16, T-Max 100, Acufine

Zeiss 250mm f/5.6 Sonnar @f/8, T-Max 100, Acufine (cropped due to water damage)

Zeiss 250mm f/5.6 Sonnar @f/16, T-Max 100, Acufine

In other news - the blog passed 30,000 views today! Pretty neat.