Weekend Photography Plans: What are you up to?

Hoping to get out and about again, it’s been a slow start to the year with the weather and lack of light by the time I get finished work - got some rolls to scan in that I got back yesterday and from first glance most of it was crap
 
In about an hour my wife and I will begin a one week trip to Fukui and Ishikawa prefectures on the Japan Sea coast of Honshu. We start on a Sunday and return on a Saturday so it's like a 7 day weekend. We'll be moving around by trains, buses and on foot. We'll be sightseeing, soaking in hot springs and there will be plenty of eating and drinking too! As usual when I travel I leave my PC behind. It's nice to take a break from the on-line life and focus on the physical world around us. So, if you don't see me posting for a week I'm not dead... I'm just enjoying doing other fun things (including lots of photography!).

All the best,
Mike
 
Yokosuka Mike said:
In about an hour my wife and I will begin a one week trip to Fukui and Ishikawa prefectures on the Japan Sea coast of Honshu. We start on a Sunday and return on a Saturday so it's like a 7 day weekend. We'll be moving around by trains, buses and on foot. We'll be sightseeing, soaking in hot springs and there will be plenty of eating and drinking too! As usual when I travel I leave my PC behind. It's nice to take a break from the on-line life and focus on the physical world around us. So, if you don't see me posting for a week I'm not dead... I'm just enjoying doing other fun things (including lots of photography!).

All the best,
Mike
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Bon voyage!
 
Hopefully, I'll be able to go out and do some shooting for myself. Things have been very busy with work and family, and I haven't had time to have a personal day for months and months. There's only so much you can do with a camera while grocery shopping. My plan is to put the Leica SL2-S through its paces with a few lenses and shoot some familiar places in the city, although it's going to be verrry cold, so we shall see. Maybe I will just stay home where it's warm and take photos of the furniture, hahaha.
 
My wife is in Vietnam this weekend traveling with a girlfriend; I was invited but sadly I've lost interest in traveling outside of Japan. My loss I'm sure but international travel just doesn't thrill me anymore.

I'm spending the weekend pushing myself to walk around in the bright sunshine and humid summer heat taking/making photographs of the streets of Yokohama.

Life is good!
Mike
 
As an addendum to my weekend plans, if I decide to brave the cold and give myself the gift of freezing my gonads off, the plan is to take out my SL2-S with the Summicron 35 SL as main lens, the Summicron M 50 with adapter and mayyybe the Elmarit M 28 as third lens.

Normally, I'd go out with the Biogon 21mm f2.8. Unfortunately, I've already seen that this lens isn't terribly sharp on the SL2-S, so although the Biogon is deliciously sharp on the M9, if I want very sharp wide angle SL images, I'll need to get a native lens like the Sigma 20mm f2, or a sharp legacy SLR lens like the Zeiss Classic 21mm ZE. So, this weekend looks more like a 35-50 kind of excursion with the SL2S.
 
I downloaded some image files from the M10 to my laptop. I checked out the M10. I am ready for photography again. The US East will have this weekend record high temperatures according to the weather forecast. Maybe it is not a good time for outdoors photography.
 
Finishing processing 9 exposures of 2x3 sheet film (Tri-X, HP5+, Efke PL100M), then off to silver print the lot along with 35mm test exposures I put through my IIIf after it came back from DAG for a minor issue (as always, he does amazing work).
 
chuckroast said:
Finishing processing 9 exposures of 2x3 sheet film (Tri-X, HP5+, Efke PL100M), then off to silver print the lot along with 35mm test exposures I put through my IIIf after it came back from DAG for a minor issue (as always, he does amazing work).
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Aaaaaand ... 6 hours later ... the negatives are developed AND silver printed 😉 Am doing side by side comparisons (of 2x3 stuff) of the same woodland scene with the variables being more-or-less Tri-X, HP5+, and PL100M using D-76 1+3. The first two were also compared using D-23 1+9+0.5g/l NaOH. Both developers employed for 25 min Semistand development.

Waiting for the prints to dry to make any final judgment but looking at contrast and sharpness particularly across these various combinations
 
chuckroast said:
Aaaaaand ... 6 hours later ... the negatives are developed AND silver printed Am doing side by side comparisons (of 2x3 stuff) of the same woodland scene with the variables being more-or-less Tri-X, HP5+, and PL100M using D-76 1+3. The first two were also compared using D-23 1+9+0.5g/l NaOH. Both developers employed for 25 min Semistand development.

Waiting for the prints to dry to make any final judgment but looking at contrast and sharpness particularly across these various combinations
Click to expand...




I put this up on Photrio as well and thought I'd share here as well ...


There is a dead fallen tree in a forest preserve near where I live that just lights up with high angle light in the mid-morning to early afternoon. Not only do the dead branches have a lot of detail, so too does the forest behind it.

I tripod mounted a "Baby" Speed Graphic with a 180mm f/5.5 Tele-Arton lens there on two different days.

The first day. I shot old (11/1969) Tri-X and and (2018) HP5+ sheet film the first day. Which was semistand processed for 25 min in D-23 1+9 with 0.5g/l NaOH added to it.

The second day, I took the same two films with me but added Efke PL100M, all of which were semistand processed for 25 min in D-76 1+3.

Although taken on different days, the lighting conditions were essentially the same with bright high sun and clear blue cloudless sky above.

I wanted to see how much difference the developers and films made as regards to sharpness and grain, noting that I was working with out of date/unavailable films in these tests. (I happen to have a fairly large stash of out of date HP5+, PL100M, and Tri-X in 2x3 in my freezer.)

I made 8x10 silver prints from these negatives and roughly matched them for exposure and contrast.

Preliminary findings, subject to revision as I inspect more carefully:

  • All things being equal, HP5+ is somewhat less contrasty in this controlled experiment than Tri-X. However, it is possible to get nearly identical print results from the two negatives using split-VC printing and exposure management under the enlarger.

  • The Efke PL100M produced a somewhat thinner negative than the Tri-X and HP5+ did in D-76 semistand development. However, the negative was properly exposed and - again - split VC printing and enlarger exposure management brought the resulting print in line with the other. It's not shocking this negative was different since the emulsion is rated at 1/2 the daylight speed of the other two films. Probably some tuning of the development time might be in order. I care about this, because even though Efke is long out of business, I have tons fo this film in 2x3 in my freezer. Moroever, Adox CHS100II may be a close replacement, so what I figure out or the Efke should translate, at least to get going.

  • I would have expected the ultra-dilute D-23 with lye to produce much sharper outcomes than the D-76 1+3. It did not. The observed sharpness of the final prints is almost indistinguishable between the two developers.

  • Even though this is very old Tri-X out out date as of 11/1969 (Kodak has not made 2x3 sheet film in ages), it seems visibly slightly sharper with less "crunchiness" than HP5+. This is consistent with my less rigorous testing of the films with more recent 35mm emulsions.

  • The prints are still just a tad damp and I need to go look in detail, but the Efke looks like it may have been the sharpest of the lot. This is consistent with my prior use of this film is which has very high acutance out of the box.

  • I did not notice any objectionable grain, but I wouldn't expect to at 8x10.

  • At some point, I'd like to drill into this a bit more and compare, say, Tri-X and Efke against these findings but using HC-110 1:128 and Pyrocat-HDC 1.5:1:200, again using semistand development.
 
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