As one year ends, we look back. As a new year begins, we look forward.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Tag: desaturated
Besides acquiring a bit of old glass, I have also, as said before, been wandering through my digital archives. Here, a photo taken in March 2017 using the Retina IIIc with the Xenon 50mm f2 lens and Agfa Vista 200. Some images I desaturated to B&W because I thought they looked better that way. Digitalizing film can be quite a good thing!
When I first used this camera, I found it rather trying. It has an EV metering system which made absolutely no sense to me, even after reading the manual. Yes, I do RTFM! However, YouTube came to the rescue once again, and there are several good videos about the Kodak Retinas from the 1950s. Many consider these to be some of the finest Kodak cameras ever produced. I won’t disagree. Nearly every American in my age group has used Kodak cameras, and many were rather cheap and produced rather poor pictures. But, for a kid, they were just perfect!
This camera came to me about 4-5 years ago from Chris Sherlock at Retina Rescue, across the sea in Australia. He’s great. You can find his videos on YouTube. Playing with it again, and having more experience with older cameras. I really appreciate this camera far more than I did before. I think I am going to throw some film in the camera and see what this puppy can do yet again.
About a week ago, on a cold, dreary day (sounds like “once upon a time” or “it was a dark and stormy night”!), I went out with my Yashica D and a roll of color negative film, Fuji Pro 400H. Colors everywhere were muted, more so as it was in the latter part of the afternoon. I guestimated all exposures, and found that I had been too conservative in my estimates as many of the pictures were under exposed. Fuji Pro 400H makes for beautiful colors in the sun, but perhaps Ektar would be better suited for a cloudy, dull day. Perhaps, too, colors would have been better rendered with more light? Hard to judge at this point – the more I use film, the more I have to think about beyond exposure!
These are the last of the Mira Sol peppers, waiting until they are ready to be harvested for seeds. I have never seen this pepper before, but we like it a lot, so we figured best to save some seeds for next year’s planting.
A bit past prime, but the Mr. Lincoln is one of the loveliest deep red roses.
This was an automatic exposure of several seconds to see if the AE function of the Mamiya 645 Pro TL was working. It is! I think a longer exposure brings out the grain.
These spinning wheels really work, if you are interested, and I do use them.
More fun with the Mamiya 645 Pro TL! You get to enjoy my messy desk . . . which is fairly tidy today.
I recently bought a Mamiya 645 Pro TL with a lens, grip, viewfinder, and film back. It’s a medium format camera. To test out that all parts were working as advertised, I put a roll of film in it and went to work. I tested the auto-exposure and manual exposure. The film advance in the grip, too. Everything worked. Focus was on the little lamp, leaving the flowers outside the field of focus. In post, I used Negative Lab Pro to process the images, but turned them to black and white in LR. Altogether, I am happy with my purchase. And I managed to get a few pictures that were decent out of all that play!
This summer I had my first really great crop of figs. This is one of the last, a few days before picking. We had some bird or rat problems – not sure which, maybe both. Rats are fair game to kill, but birds are our friends. However, birds are not really the best diners as they peck a little and take off, leaving behind damaged fruit. Netting helps. Hopefully the squirrels haven’t heard about the figs, or they don’t like them . . . No serpents thus far.
While we waited for our food to arrive at a restaurant, they kindly brought out bottles of water. The day was in the 90s (F) and we went through about 4 of them before the meal was over. This restaurant was one of the best Middle Eastern ones we have eaten at – food distinctly flavorful and unique and worth the wait for it to arrive.
The Glass Aerie 