First shoot with my new Bessa R

[DougK]

Well, my first shoot with the Bessa is complete and what a joy it is to shoot with! It was also fun having all the photo enthusiats coming up to me and asking "Is that a Leica?" in a hushed, almost reverent tone 🙂. I wish I had a better scanner to do this camera and lens justice, it was tack-sharp and nicely contrasty. From now on, this camera gets T-Max.

You can see the results here. I probably could have done more work with unsharp mask in Photoshop, but I didn't want to overdo the adjustments. I also converted to grayscale to get rid of the magenta tone from the scan. Other than that, no adjustments to the made.

 

[pvdhaar]

From your results, I'd say no more unsharp masking is necessary. They're fine as they are. By the way, was the lens you used a 35/2.5? Looks rich in contrast indeed (assuming you didn't boost that in PS)..

 

[DougK]

Thanks for the kind words, Peter. You guessed correctly on the lens, it was the 35 f/2.5 Color Skopar. I couldn't be more pleased with it, I can't wait to see what it does with ISO 100 slide film. What really helped me out was that I could find an almost perfect 18% gray value everywhere I pointed the camera, so metering for a correct exposure was a breeze. I didn't do anything to the contrast on these images at all, only desaturation to remove the color cast from the negative (the only thing I don't like about C41 black-and-white film), unsharp mask, and then resizing for the web. The bride and groom have seen them already and are very pleased with the photos as well, so now my challenge will be to rescan with sufficient quality for 8x10 prints.