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Apple Picking

These are scanned by yours truly using the state of the art crappy Epson Perfection V500 Photo running the iScan software on a AMD64 Ubuntu 11.04 machine.

220 FUJI RDP III PROVIA 100F.  I should have bought more of these.
Notice all the dust.  Scanning film is a pain.  And I am such a masochist.

Hasselblad 500C/M

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Cat

I take crappy pictures with no help from Instagram.

Film Scans

The top one was shot with the newish Kodak Portra 400, Hasselblad 500C/M and Carl Zeiss 80mm f/2.8.  I like the color and the grain isn't bad at all.

The middle two were shot using a Yashica Mat-124G and Kodak Ektar 100.  I like the color and everything.  I am always pleasantly surprised by how good the images are coming from such a small lens of such primitive contraption.

The bottom one was shot using a Nikon FE and Kodak 400VC.  I don't like the color and grain at all.  This is not the first time.  I don't know if it's because underexposed.

Storm 2010 - The Aftermath

HC-110 1:49 for 8 minutes at about 68F.

NYC Dragon Boat Festival 2010

This is straight from the scan by the shop.  I just did a resize.  The scan is much better than those from the Kodak 400VC.  It probably has to do with the film speed.  But I think 400 shouldn't be that bad.  Also I think the Carl Zeiss lenses are pretty remarkable.  Sunny 16 works pretty well for me.  Sorry no boats.

Tennis

The paid develop and scan was poorly executed.  See the dripping watermark on the left?  I don't know what happened.

On Alex:  American Optical original pilot sunglasses with bayonet arms.

UPDATE:
Guys, click the label "taxi driver" below for more American Optical and Randolph Engineering information.

Frozen Kissena Lake

Kung Fu In Kissena Park

Kodak 125PX @125, HC-110 1:49 for 8 minutes at 68F.  A lady practicing Kung Fu in the park.

+++++++

Once again, I was able to shoot thirteen frames using my C12 back.  So that's a bonus.  Though it's a little bit of a pain to file the orphan 13th frame.  Plus the 13th frame is just too close to the end that got clipped to the reel when developing.  The frame may very well get crinkled.

Last night I dumped my Kodak HC-110 after the above development.  It got kind of reddish.  The negative looked fine to me.

As an aside.  I don't know what's going on with the expired film market.  A year or two ago I was getting just expired 120 Portra for $1 a roll.  Now people are asking 120 color negative film expired in 2006 for $2 a roll.  I say no, thank you.

++++++

The 150mm CF is one of the two Hasselblad lenses I own. I like the out of focus rendition, it's pretty smooth. The 80mm CF is good, not crazy expensive and it's actually versatile but people tend to overlook just like the 50mm lens in the 135mm world. Then there is the 50mm CF which goes from $500 to $800 I think without the floating elements. The 50mm CF would be a nice addition to my Hasselblad.

First Roll of Black and White from P Almost Ready

My first roll coming from the P is processed and is hung up in the bathroom to air dry. I shall scan once the negative is ready. I think this time I beat my record in loading up the steel reel, it took me probably 2 minutes to load the film. I did it in one go and there was no crinkles, a very clean load. The exposure doesn't look bad either considering I was just guestimating the exposures as I shot along. The accessory meter doesn't work.

That was the good news.

Here comes the not so great news. Well it wasn't exactly bad. I found out I left the FE film advance lever open and the battery was duly drained. This had never ever happened to me in the 20 plus years that I own the camera. The battery has been in the chamber forever and it had been good for years. I remember I only changed it once all these years. And I thought it has auto power off even if I leave the lever in the open position. Oh well, you live and learn. Without battery the FE only operates at M90 and B unless I use it with my MD-12 motor drive.

Well I can always shoot my Hasselblad 500C/M and my Canon P sans battery and sans meter.

Yashica Mat-124 G and Hasselblad 500C/M

Both use 120 film, but I took a measurement of the image size on the negative and the Yashica is a 56x56mm square while the Hasselblad with my C12 back produces an image size of 55x55mm.  The images from the Yashica almost always stray too close to the film edges.  When I load the film I have to make sure the top take up spool mechanism is flushed all the way in and during shooting (it has some play), otherwise the image may really go too close to one side of the edge overlapping the film code there.

UPDATE:  YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, CLICK THE LABELS BELOW TO SEE MORE.

Test Post

Haw haw haw

So Google email account actually works.  I guess it's Yahoo that sucks? Well they all suck when things don't work the way I want it and I need to figure out some work around to circumvent the stupidity of one or more vendors. But I guess that's life. Somebody, somewhere, sometimes, or worse, all the time, is stupid.

A Tree On 42nd Street

Scanning film (on the Epson V500) is an exercise in frustration. Somehow I think scanning at 2400dpi and with all adjustments off except dust removal set at medium gives me the best look for black and white.

I can never really save any settings. Even I turned off the Unsharp Mask, it would creep back in automatically. So that's weird and buggy. You can't really name your setting it's automatically named like setting 1, 2 and 3 and so on. But it doesn't work anyway. After Preview, I have to uncheck the adjustment that automatically added by itself but I have to select all before doing that, otherwise, it would only apply on the selected image instead of what I really want which is all the images. I found the software buggy and annoying.

Black And White Processing

My regression has yet reached another milestone.

 

There isn't any best time to do anything, so I just went ahead, got the juice, syrup and whatnot to do my own processing.

I was too busy measuring the chemicals so I didn't take any picture. It looks to me the two rolls of 120 negative actually came out quite all right. If anything I might have overexposed some frames when taking the pictures. Oh well, you live and learn. Making mistakes is kind of inevitable, especially for someone like me.  The challenge is to learn from them and not to keep making them again and again.  I should have written down every f-stop and shutter combination on every frame I took but I never did.  I read the Kodak official PX125 paper and seems like I might have over exposed some 1-stop even with the yellow filter attached.  I thought I might have my sunny 16 down quite good.  Anyway, I really need to see the final positive images to determine how good my exposures were and how well or bad my processing was.
The next step is how the heck do I get the images from negative to positive; either by digitizing them via a scanner or sending them out to a printer. A real darkroom with enlarger is pretty much out of the question at this point.

Stay tuned for any new development.

NOTE:
Sorry for the bowl shot.  I clean it every week, it's as clean a bowl as it can possibly can.  You can drink from it though I won't recommend it.

I am glad I did a few reloading in the dark just so to make sure that the film didn't get crinkles and received even development in the process.  As it turned out, despite some minor winkles on the edge of the roll, the negative did receive even development which was what I wanted.

The negative seems thinner than I thought, especially compared to 135 format.  It's almost too soft.  I take it it's easier to get crinkles and needs to be handled accordingly.

I didn't save the developer but was able to keep the stop bath and fixer for re-use.  The developer seems to be more critical among the three from what I understand so I wouldn't mind to mix it up when I need it again.

Given the amount of work involved, it kind of makes sense to do two rolls at the same time.  But I guess I want to have the option to do a single 120 too.

The Epson V700 is a prime candidate in my book but the price is high.

Friday Pictures

I probably used the wrong emulsion.  But I use whatever I have.  Maybe one day I will get my Velvia 50.  Maybe one day I will get my field camera so I will spend at least ten minutes to snap a picture.

Overgrown Fig Tree From Neighbor

Breakfast At Home

This one comes out all right, (by my probably ill informed standard that is). I think ideally I should shoot a single roll of film under the same lighting condition so when I develop, the same roll would get the same effect, consistently good or bad. I mean you can't develop frame by frame from a 120 roll film. Anyway, for me, all different lightings across a roll of 120. So it's not really that great when it comes to develop. More work needs to be done after developing when it comes to print.

Bark

The scans come back OKAY, but the prints look pretty bad, The majority of the pictures I took them with a yellow filter in the front, I was hoping it would increase the contrast a bit. Still some of them came out pretty flat, just a mushy shade of gray, in part could be a result of overcast outdoor lighting; there was no black at all. It's hard to take good pictures and it's even harder to get some nice black and white prints. I am still agonizing, like I do with many things most of the time, over if I should proceed to develop my own black and white. I don't want to just buy stuff and end up not using them.