More of Adrian

Here are the last two 4x5 pix of Adrian. I still need to process some 120 film.

Overall, I'm happy that I nailed the focus. Adrian is a very good model. She's able to hold the pose long enough for me to do all the stuff associated with shooting a single frame of 4x5 film and not shift out of the plane of focus. So it's nice to have her expertise on board.

I love the window light in our guest bedroom. This is the first time I've had a chance to really shoot in there with that lighting. I'm quite pleased with that. The digital images in there were superb.

So I was also happy I was able to clean these negs. That was some pretty gunky stuff that accumulated on the film.

You'll notice the nude of Adrian on the bed is cropped tightly. I don't normally like to crop my 4x5 images, but this one begged for it and I sort of screwed up the original framing anyway.

Another of Adrian

So I've now tried cleaning this set of negs with the old faithful (but deadly) film cleaner (gasp). I got this one somewhat cleaner than the previous image of Adrian, but there is still a fair amount of streaking. I've done a little Photoshop to soften the streaks and clean up the neg as best I can.

You will notice around her lower back that I'm battling the dreaded Newton Rings phenomena that occurs when your negative does not lay flat on the scanner.

Finding our way back

OK. So after a long, long hiatus. I've returned to the fold and have brought you Adrian, plus just one more way to screw up some really good film.

Maybe drinking decaf isn't such a good thing for me early in the morning.

I "developed" this film only to pour out the TMax solution and see the telltale signs of the cosmetic dye leaching out of what I was pouring out. Because Kodak brilliantly added this dye, I figured out I had only processed my film in a water bath and not the actual developer solution. The dye does not show up when you pour out the developer solution.

So the film got a good 12-minute bath. Then it got processed again.

I think this contributed to the streaking and general sloppiness of the negatives.

In this picture you can't see the streaking so much because I softened the details and there are a lot of shadows in this particular image. In some of the ones to follow, you'll see some seriously bad streaking.

Bindi's Bride of Frankenstein

OK. Note to self. The Mamiya RB67 is best used on a tripod. I fear my aged hands are struggling to hold the camera in a solid plane of focus. These where shot on Ilford PanX (ISO 50). So they were shot wide open (f/5.6) using studio strobes. So there's no depth of field and I misfocused on all but these two. Even these are not tack sharp either. But I do love the way this film scanned. I also had to fudge the processing time because the normal development calls for 4 mins. in the standard TMAX 1:4 dilution. So I used the solution I normally reserve to processing my 4x5 film in TMaxRS. This resulted in a 8.5 min. development time in the 1:9 replenished solution. This gave me some pretty reasonable results. Now if I can just focus the camera, dammit!!!

Jean on 4x5

Jean is a model we brought in for some body painting. But I knocked off a couple of 4x5s before the day was done.

More 4x5

I'm beginning to think I can market these b/w art portraits. I like the idea that they are relatively simple to produce, yet the results are often unpredictable.

This one of Kandy Face is mis-focused, but I like the rawness of it. It's not so polished as the sharp, bright one of Bindy in the previous post.

We're on a roll

Been super busy this week with studio shoots. Mike and I shot a lot of digital stuff, but I also cranked out some 4x5 and a roll of 120 that I've yet to process.

Here are a few 4x5 images. To the purists I apologize for going to some Photoshop compositing on the edges of the frame. Like I said before, my scanner won't yet let me see the edges of the neg. And these images especially were calling for me to enhance them.

My favorite out of these is Bindy. The other two of Stephanie are OK. They just don't have the impact of Bindi's image. I think that's due to the makeup artist's work and intimacy of that composition.

Finally!

OK. It took a while, but this is a 4x5 from a shoot we did in my garage. We built a "Candyland" theme set and shot two models wearing some tu tu's from a local business called Chrissy Poofs. Yeah, kind of weird.

But this is a 4x5 image of Sabina, one of our models while she was not on set. I added the black borders because I can't yet get my scanner to see the edges of the film like I want. But rest assured this is an otherwise full-frame image.

Some film from the RB67

I'm taking a brief interlude from the Cambo 4x5 to revisit the Mamiya RB67. I shot a roll of Fuji Reala and Kodak Verichrome at the Renaissance Festival. I really like the results. The RB is such a heavy camera and I was winging it around with one arm while shouldering a gadget bag on one side and my Nikon Digital on the other.

That's pretty harsh duty. I really need to bite the bullet and take ONLY the RB on one of those trips--that's a hard leap of faith to make anymore.

I'm including one photo I really like. It's a shot of a falconer with a kid listening, but it has a small light leak that ruins it--so goes life with film. I'm not sure how the light stain occurred. It looks like the kind of thing that could happen if you jiggle the film back on the camera. It's kind of weird because an identical stain appears in an adjacent frame in the same location. I could Photoshop it out, but for now I'll leave it as is.

Grandma's Pearls

This is my friend Jessica posing for me in my garage studio. I managed to fit in four sheets of 4x5, TMax 100 in between about 165 digital frames we shot that afternoon. We made some great digital images, but I think this is pretty sweet stuff.

This is actually a happy mistake. I was supposed to shoot this with only the available light from the garage-door windows, but forgot I still had the studio strobes plugged into the Cambo. So this is a 1/2 sec. exposure at f/5.6-8 with bunches of strobes piled on.

We're on a roll

OK. This is kind of breaking my unwritten promise of only displaying full-frame film images. But this one begged for cropping. I returned to Apache Junction on Saturday with the wife and kids so I could take advantage of the clouds moving in. I ended up trying to do some macro work with the 4x5. I think this is a brittlebush or what's left of it. I was trying to focus on that stalk in the foreground, but with the bellows racked out and the wind gusting just a bit, I sort of back-focused. But still fun.

Back after a long hiatus

So these pictures are nothing to write home about. I debated even posting them. But I felt it was important to note some things:
1 I finally got a chance just to drag out the view camera and do some shooting.
2 My buddy, Mike, and I got stuck in traffic and reached our destination just as the sun was setting. We really should have been to the location about an hour earlier.
3 The light changed so fast I really should not have even shot these images. But I really wanted to go through the motions of using the camera and getting a feel for it after a long layoff.
4 Good news is that Sarah is finally sleeping through the night and that means I can get up in the mornings to process film again. Yea!!!
5 These images suck as far as content, composition, lighting, etc. But I consider it a small victory just to pick up the camera, shoot and process 4x5 film.