[JohnR]

It was kindof a funny overcast day yesterday, so I decided to drop a roll of Tri-X into my Bessa-L and off I went. Now, while I've been playing around with digital for a few months, this was the camera that got me back into photography, in late 2005. It has a 25mm lens on it, which to be honest I feel (without doing any actual tests or comparisons at all) gives me better results than my 24mm Nikkor. Here it is:

There are a couple of very cool/interesting things about this guy. First is that it is scale focus. Meaning that you guess the distance to the subject and then move the marker on the lens to where you want it. This took a while to get used to, but in practice, with a wide angle lens like this (and especially in daylight) there is plenty of depth of field to cover inaccuracies. As often as not, you can just set the lens to the hyperfocal distance. At f11, for example, everything from 1m to infinity is in focus.

The second is that the meter LEDs are on the back of the camera. This means that you can meter without putting the camera to your eye. (And you can still see them when you do.) While I guess you could say that this is a natural consequence of the fact that the viewfinder optics are completely separate from the rest of the camera (see pic above), I still really like this feature and wish all cameras had it!

Anyway, so I really enjoyed my little outing. I wandered around a couple of beaches just taking pics of the bathing pools, reflections of the surf club in a pool, and some rocks. Hah, I love rocks I haven't had the film developed yet, let alone scanned, but here are a couple from this camera from last year. Let me know what you think

Ghost on the Water



Palm Beach Ferry

[AdamM]

Beautiful shots

Such a great camera

It looks like we've got a few more things in common


Here's my trusty (and a little beat up) Cosina/Voigtlander.  Sooo much fun


You never mentioned, did you get the 50ASA or the 100ASA velvia 4x5?  Have you shot velvia before?  It's tricky! very unforgiving but so worth it when you nail the exposure.

/A

[JohnR]

Ha-hah!! That's too funny. I think other than the labeling they are the exact same camera, right? And you have the 15mm on that guy. Occasionally I wonder about the 15 but I'm not sure how much use I would get out of it.

I passed on the Velvia, realized getting it developed in sheets was going to be too hard/$$. And to be honest... I don't use my 4x5, it's such a big lump of a thing. Long long story, but I'll get there eventually... I'd be happy to send you some if you want, it's expired (June 2007 IIRC) from the Fuji warehouse in Brookvale. They also had 5-packs of 120 for $25. I'm pretty sure it was all 100F. I have to warn you though, Ken Rockwell doesn't like it

But hey, this is Velvia from the Bessa. I need to get more sorted out with my color scanning though. Too many things to learn 

BTW thanks for the kind comments on the pics

[AdamM]

I think other than the labeling they are the exact same camera

Yes, i'm pretty sure it's the same camera.  Side by side they're exactly the same.  Voigtlander sounds much cooler, however.
Gotta love the 'light meter' !  but you know, for all it's simplicity, it works pretty well hey?

Thanks for the offer on the 4x5 film, but i don't have one of those monsters. What do you use yours for?  Those things take supreme patience and skill!   The largest i have is a 6x9 Fujinon rangefinder which is smaller than your massive 4x5, as it's in metric.  Funny how that goes back and forth.  It's one of the bigger hunks of film you can hold in your hand.  I used it for aerial stuff years ago... a bit of a one-trick pony camera but it does that trick exceptionally well.


Ken Rockwell doesn't like 100F?  Oh well then, i better sell off the last of my stuff in the freezer ASAP!   eheheh     I would have thought he'd be into velvia, since he jacks the contrast and colours of his shots so much.  He'd be half-way there if he shot velvia!

For portraits, sure, velvia makes people look like extra-sharp tomatoes.  But for landscapes, man!  Look at the detail in your lighthouse shot - and the colours - punchy but not overboard.  The stuff is magic.  I found the 100f to be about 100, but the old 50ASA was more like a 40.  It seemed to like the 1/4 - 1/3 overexposure.  Not sure if you found that too.

Scanning slides is a soul-destroying task.  Good luck with it

/A

[lazydays]

I think other than the labeling they are the exact same camera

Yes, i'm pretty sure it's the same camera.  Side by side they're exactly the same.  Voigtlander sounds much cooler, however.
Gotta love the 'light meter' !  but you know, for all it's simplicity, it works pretty well hey?

Thanks for the offer on the 4x5 film, but i don't have one of those monsters. What do you use yours for?  Those things take supreme patience and skill!   The largest i have is a 6x9 Fujinon rangefinder which is smaller than your massive 4x5, as it's in metric.  Funny how that goes back and forth.  It's one of the bigger hunks of film you can hold in your hand.  I used it for aerial stuff years ago... a bit of a one-trick pony camera but it does that trick exceptionally well.


Ken Rockwell doesn't like 100F?  Oh well then, i better sell off the last of my stuff in the freezer ASAP!   eheheh     I would have thought he'd be into velvia, since he jacks the contrast and colours of his shots so much.  He'd be half-way there if he shot velvia!

For portraits, sure, velvia makes people look like extra-sharp tomatoes.  But for landscapes, man!  Look at the detail in your lighthouse shot - and the colours - punchy but not overboard.  The stuff is magic.  I found the 100f to be about 100, but the old 50ASA was more like a 40.  It seemed to like the 1/4 - 1/3 overexposure.  Not sure if you found that too.

Scanning slides is a soul-destroying task.  Good luck with it

/A

I almost bought one of those Fuji's awhile back. Looked like a poor man's Mamyia 7 to me. How do you like it?
gary

[AdamM]

I almost bought one of those Fuji's awhile back. Looked like a poor man's Mamyia 7 to me. How do you like it?

Great machine.  I too looked at the Mamiya 7, very lustfully as that's such a wonderful machine, but a few things tipped the scale towards the Fuji:

- Cheaper.  Quite a bit
- FANTASTIC lens.  Fujinon makes amazing lenses.  Many of the most desirable broadcast video and enlarging lenses are Fujinon.  It's cracking sharp and contrasty
- Bigger neg.  6x9 VS 6x7.

I'm sure i'd have traded it for a Mamiya 7 and a few lenses!  But for what it does, it does very well.  It's amazingly light too.    A few times i enlarged it up to 3'x5', and it was very crisp.

I still shoot it every once and a while:

This isn't the greatest shot, and sorry for the large size!  But see how the highlight ranges respond to overexposure?  the way film elegantly goes into clip.  Digital is so much harsher in the transitions from 'almost blown out' to 'blown out'  The analog 'compression' at the extremes has so much character and beauty.


I guess it's similar to recording - why so many engineers prefer analog tape, especially for really transient things like drums.  You get a bit of that analog 'medium compression' on tape which sounds really nice.

My day job is to make videogames look good, and it's a fascinating irony that to make things look 'better' you need to make them look 'worse' !!   We're right now working on some bloom and film slope/response emulations in digital (for the Xbox and PS3) which process the final digital image and 'film' it up a bit.  'Technically' it's worse, but esthetically, it's way more pretty!

So why is this?  I think it's because we've grown up watching media, shot through lenses onto film, and we have an understanding and expectation of what looks like and what optical characteristics happen at different scales.  We subconsciously have some understanding of optics. Sound absurd?  I don't think it is. 

Take a look at this very detailed model of the Melbourne train station.  The model maker spent almost $100k and over 600 hours to craft this near exact 1/3 scale model of the train station


HA. No, it's a real photo with some false DOF applied. Your mind tricks you into thinking it's smaller. Cool!

What's tricky, is with all the new videogame hardware out that's unbelievably powerful, we now can to all this stuff real-time!  - yet - without knowing the fundamentals and way that lenses / optics / film works, lots of people are going to screw it up and everyone is going to 'feel' that it's wrong, but maybe not be able to fully explain why.

I'd love to show that mini-train photo to some remote peoples who haven't been exposed to media their whole lives and see what they say about it. Well, maybe a mini photo of a goat or something instead 

Cheers,
/A

[nathanm]

I like the "Ghost on the water" shot John. Nice. 

Adam, that train shot looks exactly like a model!  Did you clone out any people by chance?  Cause plastic model people are very un-human looking and might be a dead giveaway  You should submit it to our modeling contest.  I'd be curious if my fellow train nerds can figure it out or not.  You just have to come up with some phony modeling description copy!  Heh!  Promise I won't tell!
http://walthers.com/exec/page/magic

I'm slowly working through my box of 4x5 Velvia 100 and wouldn't be surprised if I've got all sorts of exposure errors.  It will be interesting to see it finally. 

[AdamM]

Ha, Nathan, that trick is all yours   Tell them you've been working VERY VERY hard on these models and are really proud to show them off.  You've spent THOUSANDS of hours on them 











Nathan, how did you get the smoke to look so real ???

[JohnR]

Heh, now that's pretty interesting. You're doing something with the colors too, right?

Ken likes the old Velvia... I don't know any difference, I'm actually quite new to slide film.

[Daygloworange]

John,

I really like the black and whites you posted. Both are great shots. I really like the composition.   

Adam, that first shot of the train station looks like a model. I never would have guessed that it's real. 

Cheers

[navi]

what is film?

[BRILEY804]

http://www.howstuffworks.com/film.htm

[drphoto]

Where I live, there are no longer any labs left to process E6. I'd like to be able to shoot w/ my Sinar 4x5 occasionally, as I can't afford a digital back yet.

I'd say for what I do, digital is not just an adequate substitute for film but is clearly superior. I think the files I get from my Canon 1Ds Mk2 are as good as drum scanned 2 1/4 film. Before digital I hardly ever shot 35mm. Most w/ the 'blad and studio w/ the 4x5 or 8x10.

High quality digital had a wider dynamic range and the ablity to fine tune white balance is unbeatable. Other than maybe a polorizer, I don't need filters anymore. (used to have a small fortune tied up in gelatin CC filters) And of course the obvious benefit of no film/poloroid expense, the worry of the lab screwing up, no waiting, no driving to the lab....plus more enviromentally friendly without all that trash from film packaging etc.

Everyone has their opinion, but I never liked Velvia. Just way too contrasty. I shot Provia almost exclusively. I went to digital manipulation back in the mid 90's starting w/ Pshop 2.5. After that I shot color trans even when the end result was to be B/W. Trans scan so much better than B/W negs. Plus by using the color channels you get your B/W filters built in. Want the effect of a red filter on a landscape? Just pull most of your conversion from the red channel!

I would say for art photography (vs commercial work like I do) there IS a place for film. It is hard to beat a real gelitin silver print on quality paper. Ink jet.....even the high end stuff just isn't the same.

[lazydays]

what is film?

God still keeps film on this planet just to make digital shooters envious. No matter how good that digital camera is it will always be almost as good as film.
gary

[AdamM]

Really good points drphoto

For the working pro, digital is a godsend - turnaround time alone!   With tools like Lightroom and Photoshop, available instantly - heck maybe your camera wifi's the shots as you take them to your workstation in the studio!

It's also pretty nice to be able to shoot with a 1DS MkII - you've got a lot more megapixels than the average digital shooter there

You're right, where digital still doesn't touch film is in B+W - end result.  Digital doesn't have the latitude of a number of B+W films, and neither does most (any?) digital output formats.

I've wondered why someone doesn't make a B+W body - stuff the R/G/B filters on the sensor, make it full luminosity alone.  Your 16.7MP 1DS would become, what, a 50MP no interpolation camera??  Or heck, stuff the smaller sensor sites and go with a 20MP massively HDR 16 bit B+W monster.

I know it won't happen, but it doesn't stop me from dreaming.

Ok, Canon, don't bother with the B+W DSLR....  Leica / Contax / Panasonic - make a B+W digital rangefinder which uses M42 screwmount lenses.  Price it at $1000 and you'll sell a boatload.

/A

PS The worst worst  (best!) film ever was agfachrome 1000, 2 years out of date, overexposed 1 stop then cross-processed.  That's still a hard look to do digitally

[AdamM]

I've got to correct a point from my last message:

Digital doesn't have the latitude of a number of B+W films

Shooting RAW with a decent DSLR digital does technically have a wider latitude to B+W, but there are differences in the response.

Take a well exposed good shot using something like Technical Pan 25 (i think the sharpest and widest latitude B+W film available) or even just a decent 100, shoot on medium format, and print it on some high-end fiber paper.  Now try to recreate that with digital->inkjet/lightjet/whatever.

You just can't get there. The contrast and density and look of that beautiful fiberprint.    That would be a really great side-by-side comparison to do one day.. Hmmmm..

/A

[nathanm]

Outside of art photography (or maybe commercial portraiture?) there really is no escaping digital.  Your image will be put into a computer at some point.  But neither medium is obviously superior, it depends on what you want to do, how much time you have and what you want the end result to be.  I think the gap is closing between the two.  Although I can get more done and be more creative with digital I'm interested in doing the wet darkroom thing now just for old times sake.

[AdamM]

I'm interested in doing the wet darkroom thing now just for old times sake.

Yeah, there's a certain pleasurable nostalgic process there.  Pondering over your exposures, the click without any preview of what just happened, the wait, the excited moments first looking through the shots in the lab. Maybe akin to an old steam locomotive or something    Or a combustion engine car in a decade or two!

There is another area where digital is even further behind than B+W prints on the wall, and i don't see catching up any time soon:  Projection.

Shoot a medium format chrome.  Mount it, put it in my old Zeiss 6x7 slide projector and aim it at a white wall.   You're THERE    It's truly quite breathtaking.

Here's something incredibly fun:  shoot two shots of the same subject - say flowers - about a foot apart.  Put the 'left' shot in one projector, the 'right' shot in the other. Aim them together onto a lenticular screen.  Put polarizer filters on each one rotated 180* apart from each other.  Wear 3D polarizer glasses.  The 3D effect is so staggeringly vivid it's almost unbelievable.

/A

[nathanm]

My uncle used to show old family snaps with a 35mm slide projector.  The picture quality smokes just about any modern day multi-kilobuck HDTV device.  I'd love to get my hands on a 4x5 projector but I can't even find a picture of one online much less buy one!  There was one called a Noblux or Noblex as far as I can find out.  The closest I found are very expensive projectors used for theater productions.  If you could project 4x5s in your living room do that you'd have quality superior to the friggin' IMAX!

Stereo images are indeed cool.  I mean, who could forget the Viewmaster discs! Heh!  Never heard of that projector trick though, sounds cool.  Even just a straight chrome has a 3D quality when you look at it with a lupe.

[drphoto]

I have very little nostalgia for the 'good old days'. When I first went out on my own I didn't have enough photo business alone, so I ran a custom B/W lab. It was successful, but it meant up to 12 hrs a day in the darkroom. I hope to never smell fixer again. 

Hey Nathan....I haven't forgot about you.....I've just been swamped. Just when I start thinking about going back to school for the pharmacy thing....the photo biz gets really busy......weird. New stuff too. MickyD's, KFC...just fell out the sky.

Yeah....the 1DS Mk2 kicks ass. The Mk1, which I also have was good too. The Mk2 has lower noise, especially at higher ISO equivilents. I'll bet the new one is something else.

 I really want a back for my view cam. I'd be happy even w/ an older one like a Phase One P20 which is only the same rez as my Mk1 Canon. However the image quality is incredible. I want to do some architectual work using a normal lens, but sliding the back to make a 3 pass panorama. A wide shot w/out the wide angle distortion.