I have since long been a "wide angle guy". My "normal lens" used to be a 24 mm prime in the film days, and now when gone digital I seem to have gone even wider. A 20 mm prime is often in use, or my 17-35 zoom which I very often zoom out to the widest focal length. The wide perspective is of course gorgeous for small spaces, interiors, a lot of landscapes etc.. But I find myself a little too often starting cropping my pictures in post processing. Suddenly I find details which are at least as interesting as the big picture. Cropping is of course then just a couple of mouse clicks worth of work, but with a loss, sometimes substantial, of picture resolution.
So the exercise now is to start getting more narrow. Try out some telephoto! An 85 mm prime will do the work. The lens is a gorgeous, almost mint condition Nikkor 85/2 AI-s from the early 1980's. I was lucky enough to buy one a couple of months ago. Now it is time to use it! And the "prime medicine" involves forcing myself to keep the lens on the camera for at least a half day! No quick changes of lenses, just start reprogramming your brain to the new focal length!
Suddenly you can pick out beautiful details on building. Like this from the 18th century Royal Haga Pavilion.
Or you may just pick some contrasting patterns like in this picture.
Some spring flowers can be cut down to a simple composition.
And you can even reach out for some distance. This picture is cropped, but just slightly.
I just processed my third roll of TriX processed in Rodinal. Late March has been extremely cold but I am now hoping for spring sooner or later. The ultra-grain combination of Rodinal+TriX worked well for the icy landscapes but now I think I will check out some other options. I have just ordered a bottle of HC-110 (classic developer) and a pack of Fomapan 100. Maybe the stuff needed for spring!
So these are the last pictures from grain-land for this time!
First a rather majestic functionalistic building from my neighborhood.
And here we have some spring! At least the sun part of it, but not the temperature. The ice is still solid in Stockholm harbor.
The ice is at least thick enough to carry animals (I guess it is birds... or dogs? The footprints do not look human anyway).
And this is the final Rodinal+TriX picture for now. Quite effective but I would appreciate a less brutal grain in this picture. The light was however very interesting in this shot and I also did some digital dodging and burning to capture this.
I just finished my second roll of Tri-X black and white film. This one was also processed by myself, at home. Again I chose Rodinal, this ancient recipe from the 19th century which delivers very crispy and rather grainy results. I kind of like it, at least for the more "artsy" type of photos, architecture etc.
The big problem is of course to develop the second roll exactly the same way as the first one. Right concentration of chemicals, right temperature, right agitation ... It is not very different from cooking at home and trying to repeat the wonderful sauce or dessert you presented to your dinner guests two weeks ago. I think I was somewhat successful, but the pictures turned out a little lighter on the negative, in other words a little darker. Maybe my developer was slightly colder this second time, or ... Well the pictures can be used anyway. Quite a lot of experimenting this time. I also fool around a little with toning and careful coloring at some times.
This is from the Stockholm City Hall. Nice late winter light. Two couples at the front of the brick wall. The tower in the background. I used a yellow filter to get the dramatic sky effect (almost black sky).
This is the Konradsberg Mansion. It used to be a mental hospital (nicknamed "Fool's Palace") but is now used by the Stockholm University. I think the building has a quite eerie character.
On the back of the building I captured this shot. It is a simple water reflection of the tower turned upside down.
And finally a picture from a nearby residential area, Fredhäll. It is a strict functionalistic district with buildings from the 1930's. I have a weakness for "dullness" at some times and I like to capture it when I am in the mood myself.
I always carry a camera. If nothing more fancy it is my little compact, a Lumix LX5 which is small enough to fit into a jacket pocket but good enough to get really good pictures. A couple of days ago I took a walk home after work and passed Vasabron (an old bridge in central Stockholm). I have walked this bridge hundreds of times and taken dozens of photos. So you need to see something new everytime... This time the pictures featured some birds.
This one was taken with flash on to get some detail in the pillar. And here we have some natural birds. City Hall in the background.
So now I finally decided to start some film developing on my own. Partly out of curiosity, partly to save some cost and mostly to revive old memories which are now more than 30 years old. So I bought chemicals and some gear and developed the last film I finished with my camera.
The Rodinal developer produces "rock-n-roll style" grain and acutance which is something I really like. The last roll contained mostly generic shooting so most of the pictures are rather uninteresting. Maybe because I knew, subconsciously, that I was going to do the developing myself and wanted to minimize the risk of self-inflicted harm due to rusty skills...
This picture however turned out quite good. Nice afternoon light over the Stockholm Cathedral (Storkyrkan) in Old Town.
Quite often my outdoor pictures taken in clear weather contain contrails. I don't know why, maybe I like these patterns painted in the sky. The three pictures from yesterday all contain these sky marks. The weather was very clear and bright and the condensation from the numerous airplanes above seemed to stay for a long time.
February and March are the dullest months in Stockholm. Dull, Grey, Depressive. The sun can be absent for weeks! This time of the year I would like to relocate to the north to upper Scandinavia where you have really nice winter well into April. Or go south and meet the spring in the Mediterreneans. But here in Stockholm we are caught in the Baltic Mists!
My last pictures are taken with a film body with Tri-X film pushed to 800. This yields grainy and "depressive" pictures. Since the light is so bleak I sometimes extend the contrast a little, and the pictures get even more grainy and harsh.
Small footprints in the snow...
The last weeks have been filled with attempts to capture the dullness of Stockholm this time of year. My tool is a camera loaded with good old Tri-X film, and it is provides for a forgiving and sometimes inspirational way of capturing the grayness, the ice and snow and the low sunlight.
A very narrow alley in Old Town. Frequently visited and photographed by tourists!
It has been quite a lot of film shooting for me lately. Wintertime is quite black and white overall so I don't miss color film (or DSLR) very much. With an attached yellow filter it is quite easy to enhance the pictures quite a lot for black-and-white. I have used yellow filters since I was a kid but of course I had lost my old filter after a long time of non-use. Fortunately I found one in a good photo store (they had to look deep in their inventories..).
And this is one of the shots of a sunny winter day. Camera straight into the sun and the whiteness of the frozen waters. This picture got quite severly underexposed so I had to be quite creative in postprocessing. So we are close to the land of Lomography here!
In my last post I wrote about how I started "scanning" my B/W negatives using a rather standard DSLR setup. And sofar I have been very happy with the results! What I didn't cover was how to actually post-process the pictures, and I might not be ready to describe it now already since there are many lessons still to be learned. Nevertheless, I have already found some tricks which could be useful.
I am a big fan of Lightroom, and when used for this kind of work it really shines. It is not just for technical merits, it is also the close resemblance to the "wet processing" world of the darkroom. The simplicity and the "closeness to the photo" appeals to me a lot. So this story is how to do it in Lightroom, folks..
On the other hand I am not at all a big fan of lomography-style processing style with simulated light leaks, artificial grain and all those weird things. I like crisp and contrasty results, and now since I am using Tri-X film (pressed to 800) there is of course a lot of grain to handle. Grain is beautiful! The problem is to use it to your advantage, and this is difficult. I think I have found some tricks for this.
Let's first start with the curves in Lightroom. Since I am taking a photo of a negative, intending a positive result I will need to create an "inverse" curve. This is easily done by "tipping it" in the wrong direction. This will make black become white and vice versa. For color you flip red vs cyan, blue vs yellow, magenta vs green etc... Creating a negative of the negative! It looks like this:
As you can see the curve is reverse linear, but I have pumped up the mid-tones a little.
The next interesting setting is the split toning. I have a preference for a slight toning and like a blue tint to the pigment (blacks) and a little creamy yellow for the paper (whites). This is of course very much a personal taste, but this is how you do this in Lightroom:
And now on the sharpening.
I was a little surprised to find that this heavy sharpening was useful, but the film adds something which really likes a heavy USM to be applied to get the details clear and obvious. But the trick is to later on reduce sharpness in all areas of the pictures which feature soft areas and gradients. More on this later..
And finally the Basic settings. This is where you adjust blackness/whiteness, contrast and exposure. For all shots you will need to do final tweaks here. This is the default I use, and as you can see the picture gets a little underexposure (-0.85 steps) but actually this is an overexposure since you work with a negative!
Apart from the settings above you can of course tweak around with vignetting, lens corrections etc etc. All this is done at your discretion and according to your taste. It is however a good choice to apply profile corrections to your lens, if these are available in Lightroom.
So where do we get then? To make it easy you can download my current fave preset for B/W negative shots here! Just install it in your copy of Lightroom (version 4 needed) and you have my settings ready to use.
And now the final and important technical and artistical pain. How to handle the grain? Actually my rather over-sharped settings produce quite a noticeable grain and grain aliasing in many parts of pretty much any picture. For smooth areas you may feel tempted to reduce this effect to create a more calm expression in your image. Well, don't just feel tempted, just do it! This is so easy with Lightroom! Just create an adjustment brush and set the "Sharpness" value to something like "-30" and paint the smooth areas. This will make a drastic improvement of the grain artifacts in those areas, making the grain softer.
Let's take a look at a detail in one of the pictures I worked with.
First without the adjustment:
As you can see the ligher parts of the water surface are quite heavily affected by grain. Let's paint this surface with the "-30 sharpness" brush and keep the darker surface (with the small snow balls) intact. Now we get this:
That's a difference, isn't it! The final picture can be seen here. Click on it to get a full-screen lightbox view in Flickr!
