Category: photography

No, my film isn’t ready yet – I checked today while also dropping my black & white film for development. And so, while I’m still waiting for the first results of my new (or reborn) love of film photography, I played around with digital a bit since Friday.

First I took a portrait of a cute colleague named Linliang (people call her Lily which is easier) which I took in July last year, and slightly split-toned the original black & white one. Looks like this:

Linliang, Frankfurt 2015

If you think this looks like a normal black & white photo, compare it to the original one – both are on Flickr, so you can download and then switch between them to see the differences.

Yesterday Mitchie made a very delicious cheesecake. Tho I’m no big fan of cheesecake, this was indeed an outstandingly good one. And before we ate too much of it, I decided to take a photo, which Mitchie uploaded on her Flickr page and used in communications in her Whatsapp already:

Cheesecake! (in Mitchie’s Flickr photostream)

And today I took two, one inside, one outside:

Playin’ a standard…

Spring is here…

Thanks for viewing and reading.

I’m still waiting for my first film to be developed by the local drugstore (who have to send it to some lab), and my second film – black & white this time – is nearly full.

What did I encounter so far?

Well first some bad news, at least for me: my Olympus OM-2N develops the same issue which Zuleikha has with her OM-1 – sometimes they kind of “lock”. Which means that the mirror goes up, the shutter opens – and then it stays that way.

That happened once while I was using the Agfa Precisa CT100 colour slide film, but three times already with my Agfa APX100 black & white one – and so far the film counter is on 30 of 36 pictures.

Wow. So at least 4 pictures ruined, with film not being exactly cheap anyway. I’ve looked around a bit, and it seems to be a mechanical problem, and the process to fix it isn’t really trivial at all – see here if you’re interested.

So it’s back to digital? I don’t know, I’ll decide after I’ve got my second film full and back from the lab. In the mean time, I was looking at some older pictures from 2012, and photographed a few negatives and slides with my E-M10, my ZD 50mm/2 macro lens, and a slide copier. Here are two of these:

Zuleikha, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2012 (got a hair on my negative)

This is Kodak BW400CN, an ISO 400 black & white film based on the C-41 colour negative process, which means that development is cheap and fast, and prints also don’t cost that much. It’s a very fine grain for ISO 400, no bad film at all. Ilford has some similar one called XP2, and both are not cheap (like APX100 would be in the local drugstore).

And though I’ve got one of my big fat blond hairs on the negative, Zuleikha still finds that “scan” much better than the low-res lab scan you can also opt for during development.

Here’s another one:

Zuleikha, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2012

This is Agfa Precisa CT100, the same one that I’m currently waiting for (except that this one wasn’t expired yet while I used it). I’ve decided to show an uncropped view through my slide copier, as my camera “sees” it when using my 50mm macro lens. The lighting wasn’t flash like in the first black & white one, but our LED room light, so I did this one on a tripod with delay. The white balance was set to the white wall which I used as a background, so what you see is the actual film colours overlayed by the colours of my E-M10, which I turned down all the way (like contrast as well). The rest is pretty much like out of camera; you can achieve something similar when simply setting the camera as described (contrast -2, saturation -2), and using the out-of-camera jpg.

Very vivid, isn’t it? And still kind of “natural”, an almost “organic” result with some quite pleasing skin tones. By far not as sharp and detailed as digital, but I still love it.

In the meantime, we’ve had the “Luminale” here in Frankfurt; a yearly light festival where they put lots of artificial illumination up onto and inside of some buildings. My colleague Basti wanted to see it, and he brought his Nikon D810 to get some photos of it.

It’s very rare that he brings that camera to the workplace, and this time he allowed me to use and to compare it to mine, so I took the same picture (of him) with both my Olympus OM-D E-M10 and the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 and with his Nikon D810 and a 50mm/1.4G lens, both set to f/4. Don’t know whether I could show these here (I haven’t asked for it so far), but except the difference in depth of field, those pictures were quite similar on first sight.

On a second view, I noticed of course that his camera has a lot more leeway once you start to move some sliders in your raw converter, and I also liked the look of his 50mm lens at f/4 better than the one of my 25mm lens when using the same aperture – should have used f/2 on mine…

… which is what I just did with my OM-2N (at f/4) and my “digicam” at f/2; see my “featured” image above (the film is still in the camera of course). Depth of field in these should be about the same, and it will be interesting to see if I can get my digital image to look anywhere close to that film when I have it back.

Speaking of which: Google decided to just lower the price for the entire Nik collection to zero – yup, you’ve got that right, they give it away for free! I cannot make much use of it, since these are Lightroom and Photoshop plugins, both of which I don’t have and use. But anyway, Nik Silver Efex Pro is maybe the best of all black & white converters around, so go and download the entire collection here. Thanks Google, that is an amazing present!

As always, thanks for looking and/or reading.

During the week I took some more photos with my camera set to black & white, some of which I want to show here. The weather was a bit nicer sometimes, which explains my first visit to our employers’ gardens after these winter months. And I found a new sign there:

Ungrounded?

The morning after I also walked around the building, where I saw him:

Watcher of the skies

I also began to take photos “Moriyama style”, without even looking through the viewfinder or onto the rear display of my camera. Daido Moriyama once said that people instantly spot you if you take the camera up to look through it, so he often takes (or took) pictures “from the hip”. I tried it for instance while walking through our entrance door at work:

Revolving door, Moriyama-style

I also took this one of some other employees without looking:

A complicated door

In front of our building, there’s a taxi stand. And it’s mostly the same drivers (and most probably, owners of these cars) which are standing there. Because most of the day they’re just waiting for customers, they sometimes play a game of chess – and finally I took a photo of it (this one was framed with looking through my viewfinder again):

Das Spiel der Könige – Game of Kings

Though I *did* use some underexposure, the highlights here were still a bit of a problem, and I also applied some Kodak Tri-X film emulation onto the photo, which further boosted contrast and blacks.

The same evening, I took this one:

Plastic tree – see also Eduardo Leal’s work in LensCulture

During my next lunch break, someone was taking a nap:

Nap

Cropped that one into the 16:9 format; makes a nice desktop background for instance. And in the evening when taking the lift down on my way home, I took a “selfie” in that Moriyama style:

On my way home…

The next (yesterday’s) morning shortly after I arrived at work, and was on my way up to our second level offices, I caught Sergej the security guard on his lonely walk from buildings “A” to “C”. Here I also applied a Tri-X film emulation for a bit more contrast:

Frankfurt, 2016

So that’s it with photos from this week, and speaking of film: I was reading and re-reading the blogs and articles of some other photographers who use both film and digital cameras for their work, and while doing so I was often looking at our bookshelf, where Zuleikha and I still had some films waiting to be used. So it was a matter of time until I decided to load one into my OM-2 camera, and this is what I did today:

Back to film

As you can probably see, it’s Agfa precisa CT100 colour slide film which is inside the camera now, and I’ll be using it whenever I can. So no further uploads to Flickr, and no blogs with photos for a while, until I ran some rolls of film through my camera, and got them processed, and scanned to digital.

I want some real grain for a change, and I’m also very much looking forward to the more Zen-like experience of using film again (no chimping, no instant gratifications, no daily raw conversions, uploads, and so on). Slowing down a bit is good sometimes…

So let’s wait and see whatever I’ll produce with my “full frame” old SLR.

As always, thanks for reading.