Shadams
Member
And, I'm enjoying the conversation!
With regard to digital detox, what dev did you mix and use? I used Dektol (sp?). I flirted with Rodinal but couldn't make it really work for me so I went back with my tail between my legs!
digital Detox
- Thread starter caila77
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With regard to digital detox, what dev did you mix and use? I used Dektol (sp?). I flirted with Rodinal but couldn't make it really work for me so I went back with my tail between my legs!
Shadams
Member
I was able to make Nikon work for me. Fab with strobes. Nikon yellows and reds I found delicious after some in-camera adjustment. Sony? Nope. That was a black and white camera. Eventually the RX100 series seemed to get a better colour vibe in the jpeg but still not there for me.
My first experience with Fuji was those portrait cameras in Nikon D bodies. S2? S5? I don't use the film emulations. Just the STD with some tweaking in-camera.
The RP has taken a lot of work to get to where I like it. Still....
Yes, Fuji Velvia hurt my eyes. Loved Acros and Astia...
I find the real solution is to wait for the light. Alex Webb has a great book - Suffering the Light. Fabulous. Jay Maisel's Light, Gesture, and Color is, brilliant.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
... The film came out nice: 1947 Leica IIIc, 2011 Voigtländer Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.5. I'll scan it tomorrow and see what it's got worth posting. "Digital deTox" indeed. LOL!
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Shadams
Member
Were you, by any chance, air force? I know, it's a left-field question but there it is.
Quite apart from that, learning to "...live with occasional disappointment in the results...." is such a powerful and true statement. No photographer I know has walked away from a subject thinking, yeah, I got it. If they did, they weren't actually a photographer or they were having a delusional psychotic break. Neither is a good look! So I'm with you on the disappointment factor; it's valuable. Indispensable.
DownUnder
Vamoosed (for a while)
The (alas nowadays very few) stock image buyers I still submit - and occasionally sell - to all want COLOR in big, bold, capital letters. Their art directors do all the required work to make my images right for their printing processes. It seems a myth with those who are getting interested in stock imagery, but haven't yet taken the time to do the requisite research on how to do it correctly, believe their super-hyped-up images over sharpened and with the colors skewed all over the place, will be of any interest to potential buyers. Believe me when I say they aren't. In fact the less PP work done on submitted images, the better. The art directors all tell me this.
Colors are subjective. I cut my photo teeth on the early '60s Anscochrome, Ektachrome and Kodachrome, so exaggerated colors were the norm. Human subjects all looked like they were suffering from excessively high blood pressure. Trees, flowers, even gardens were so green, it was a wonder bowls of salad on dining tables didn't glow in the dark. Blues were radiant and yellows made overripe bananas look anaemic. Think Hollywood Technicolor and you get a pretty good idea about what color slide films were like circa 1960.
These days more muted colors like the Fujis produce are the norm. I have yet to let my brain adjust to those, but I see they are vastly popular with amateur photographers. Well and good But book and magazine publishers tend to reject those, or blow up the colors so brightly, they literally explode off the pages. That's how it is.
My Nikons give me the colors I like. Fujis, well. Yesterday I was out photographing in a small city in East Java, with my usual travel kit of a Fuji XE2 and the 18-55 lens with a 14/2.8 in the bag (but not used on this outing). My colors were cranked up to +2, the highest setting on the XE2, but I did use the Provia and not the Velvia film simulation, so maybe I've learning, slowly. Fortunately there is room for us all in the bucket of how we perceive and like our colors.
How this all fits into a digital detox thread is anybody's guess. Let's just call it a small blast from the past.
Colors are subjective. I cut my photo teeth on the early '60s Anscochrome, Ektachrome and Kodachrome, so exaggerated colors were the norm. Human subjects all looked like they were suffering from excessively high blood pressure. Trees, flowers, even gardens were so green, it was a wonder bowls of salad on dining tables didn't glow in the dark. Blues were radiant and yellows made overripe bananas look anaemic. Think Hollywood Technicolor and you get a pretty good idea about what color slide films were like circa 1960.
These days more muted colors like the Fujis produce are the norm. I have yet to let my brain adjust to those, but I see they are vastly popular with amateur photographers. Well and good But book and magazine publishers tend to reject those, or blow up the colors so brightly, they literally explode off the pages. That's how it is.
My Nikons give me the colors I like. Fujis, well. Yesterday I was out photographing in a small city in East Java, with my usual travel kit of a Fuji XE2 and the 18-55 lens with a 14/2.8 in the bag (but not used on this outing). My colors were cranked up to +2, the highest setting on the XE2, but I did use the Provia and not the Velvia film simulation, so maybe I've learning, slowly. Fortunately there is room for us all in the bucket of how we perceive and like our colors.
How this all fits into a digital detox thread is anybody's guess. Let's just call it a small blast from the past.
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Another old Anscochrome shooter here. It was cheap and OK but I preferred Kodachrome and if I could get it, Agfachrome. The haughty jeunne dame at the PX camera counter in Fontainebleau explained it to me as with Kodachrome that 18th century chateau looked fresh-painted. With Agfachrome it looked real. Costco brought out Kirkland slide film that was Agfa. And as much as I really like the M9 sensor's colors with the Leica color science, I kinda like the M240, too. Again, Kodachrome vs Agfachrome. But, honestly, the X2D with HB color science and a good HB lens does it the best.
I do believe that image buyers want them untouched. The guys who works on images knows what they look like SOOC. He needs to know where he is starting from to get where he wants to be. Shooter PP leaves him with a scrambled map.
I have the working Contax II, currently with XP5, and a Contax III that has to go to Oleg. No more analog, thank you. But maybe I can run some color through one of them. The III has a CZJ 1.5 that is coated so it might be the one to use for color. OTOH I have a '42 5cm CZJ 1.5 LTM that is amazing with color. Those who know say that Schott put pixie dust in the glass for those lenses. It is amazing what good engineers could do with slide rules, Mannheim or log log decitrig. Yes, I still have my Pickett log log decitrig. Don't get too excited, it is a yellow plastic one. ;o)
Godfrey
somewhat colored
I've deTox'ed ...
Fence Detail - Santa Clara 2025
Leica IIIc + Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.5
Ilford HP5
... at least for the present. 😉
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—
"No matter where you go, there you are."
- Buckaroo Banzai, "Across the 8th Dimension"
Fence Detail - Santa Clara 2025
Leica IIIc + Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.5
Ilford HP5
... at least for the present. 😉
G
—
"No matter where you go, there you are."
- Buckaroo Banzai, "Across the 8th Dimension"
DownUnder
Vamoosed (for a while)
Well written as always, boojum. But you know that...
My first stray thought on this most excellent post. I processed most of my Anscochrome slide films in my home darkroom in the 1960s, when I was in my teens. Obviously I must have followed the instructions from the kits well, and/or the film was much better than the Ektachrome and other slide emulsions of that time, because all my 19960s Ansco slides have survived with almost no color shift. Never mind that the images I took nowadays rarely rate a look see, but they have lasted well. A few family photos, notably of my long-gone grandparents and cousins now in their 60s and 70s who were then babies and young children, are valued images by them and their children and grandkids. Otherwise they are all vapid landscapes of no particular merit as many teenage photographers took back then - but they have survived so well over the past 60+, which amazes me.
Movie' on now.
It's good to remember that those book publishing art directors are well salaried professionals. I also get reasonably well paid for my stock photos but nothing like those bods earn for sitting in their offices and playing with top-of-the-range (and bl**dy expensive) post processing software. So I prefer to let them earn their dosh by doing the donkey work on my photos, which they prefer anyway as they are there to make all the visuals fit to a certain standard in a book.
I read that boojum is into Contax cameras. For a decade I used a Contax G1 kit for all my stock images until Nikon came out with the D90 and I went over to the dark side. I still have the G1 (in fact I still own two) and four Zeiss Contax G lenses, notably the Biogon 28/2.8 which I personally regard as one of the finest optics ever made.
In the next month I will be rescanning a few thousand old film images I did on scanners (a Plustek for 35 and an Epson for 120) during the Covid lockdowns in Australia. Almost all those scans don't quite come up to the technical standard book publishers will buy. So a rescan project is in the planning.
The big exception to my Covid era scanning woes have been the negatives I made with the G1. All of those scan to an amazing degree of sharpness and the scans hold their tones and mid tones and the colors so well. With my Nikons and other (older) cameras, not so good. I don't have many Agfa slides, but most of the ones I do have major color shifts - they are from the 1970s and 1980s and were processed in Asia, which maybe explains the reasons for this problem - so a shipload of post processing work (and time) is confidently and annoying anticipated.
I'm leery of spending endless days of my fast-dwindling life span hovering over an overheated Plustek, so I plan to set up a Nikon copy system to redo all this donkey work. If I could I would happily convert a G1 with maybe a Zeiss 45/2.0 Planar for this setup, but common sense tells me this is probably impossible, so I'll go with Nikon instead. Exciting times lie ahead.
With the Plustek my Kodachromes and color negatives scan best, with B&W on top of the list for the finest results. With the Epson everything in 35 comes out unsharp, but my 120s are fine. So go figure...
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Godfrey
somewhat colored
I do all my 'scanning' using a copy camera approach now, except when I get lazy and scan instant prints with my Epson multifunction printer/scanner. I've used a variety of cameras and lenses over the years, but nowadays (since I have them) the Leica M10 Monochrom and M10-R bodies are my usual scanning tools (depending on B&W or color originals). I have an R Adapter M and a couple of Leica R-system lenses (bought cheap in the days a decade and some ago when R-system equipment was practically being given away) to do the job, and a nice copy stand, negative carrier, and light source. Doesn't take much other than that, and software to render the results.
The results are as good as your efforts at a good setup and your skills at image processing. Setup takes time, capture not much, rendering takes time. If you enjoy the process, it's a joy. Otherwise, it's a chore. 🤷♂️ I enjoy it, but I don't bother trying to do a huge volume.. That's too much like work. 😀
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bulevardi
Well-known
I've got a specific old lens that works with an adapter ring on a DSLR that I have (a crop frame).
However, the results would look better on a full frame DSLR. ... or an old SLR.
It made me doubt again.
So last days I was looking again for a second hand SLR where this lens would fit handy. It would cost me around € 200.
Ok fine... But a second hand full frame DSLR I could find around € 300.
Then again I was thinking about, if I'd do the analog one, I'd need film again around € 15 a roll, + € 15 development+hi-res scans each time, would end up with € 300 after 10 rolls.... It's already the same price as if I would buy the DSLR full frame.
Of course I would have more fun with the analog one....
But maybe it's better to give new life to a digital one, better for the planet? (otherwise it'll probably not sold anymore and end in a recycling thing) Would the analog one be more environmentally harmful because of the chemicals?
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DownUnder
Vamoosed (for a while)
Many years ago I tried to duplicate B&W and color negatives with a Nikkormat and a generic copy outfit. The results I had the most problems with was contrast, which was always too high for good quality prints. I tried an endless stock of developers and films including the old Kodak copy film which IRRC came in 150-foot cans and had to be rated at ISO 6 or some such silly number. and was usually processed in highly diluted Dektol. Nothing I did with it came out in any way usable beyond snapshot size prints. Clueless me, I had four or five cans of this odd film as it was sold heavily discounted from my photo retailer. Eventually I gave up and dumped the lot on Ebay. Someone in Italy bought it. I recall they paid more in postage than for the film and the copy device. There's always one born every minute, I thought, but I did hope they got good results from it, I sure didn't.
Digital may be a different kettle of pixels. I will be home in AUS for about six weeks later this year so it will give me something to do on those cold cold winter nights other than watching old movies on YouTube and drinking too much good Aussie cab-sav. Good luck to me on this...
Digital may be a different kettle of pixels. I will be home in AUS for about six weeks later this year so it will give me something to do on those cold cold winter nights other than watching old movies on YouTube and drinking too much good Aussie cab-sav. Good luck to me on this...
