my life, my thoughts, my world.

A few Tuesdays ago, my youngest sister and I took a ride to IAH to board the first of three flights that would take us to our parents in Aberdeen, Scotland. In the interest of not missing our flight, we arrived several hours early. Security was easy enough since we were flying out of Terminal E. No need to wait in the mammoth line typical of Terminal C. This proved to be a good thing. With more than thirty rolls of film to hand check someone would have surely been irritated had I been at a different terminal. The TSA folks were happy to scan the film. I suspect that’s because doing something unusual breaks up the monotony of their job.

Our first flight was uneventful. IAH to EWR. When we landed someone else was still parked at the gate, but we made the connection still so it wasn’t a huge problem. At EWR we boarded a demon aircraft. Some pump/compressor/generator used during taxiing was not mechanically sound and made the most terrible cyclic noise I’ve had the displeasure of hearing in quite a while. Of course with a busy airport we spent a long time sitting on the jetway waiting, and that damned noise was with us the entire time. It was loud, and clearly caused several of the people on the plane physical pain. When we finally landed in the UK we got to deal with the same racket again. Continental/United ought to get out of the practice of flying aircraft with an obviously failing system on board. The only part of the trip that was a real nightmare was our short hop from Heathrow to Aberdeen. There was an infant, a cute baby even, seated directly behind me. What a set of lungs – for the entire flight.

The first thing I noticed about Scotland was how green everything was. The buildings? All grey and dreary. The surroundings? As green as green gets. For a moment, I almost wished I’d gone heavy on the color film instead of bringing a ton of B&W film.

My Mom did a good job getting us to our parents’ flat in one piece. She’s never paid much attention to lanes so driving on the wrong side of the road didn’t phase her. I’m sure our time in Malaysia helped. Where my folks live is awesome. There’s a view of rolling hills right out the front windows, maybe 20 yards from their front door is a trail that goes for more miles than I could have run even at my most fit, and maybe a 1000 yards or so beyond that is a river. Excellent.

Jetlag wasn’t as much of a problem as the fact that Aberdeen is way further north than I’ve ever been before. As such, during the summer the sun never really goes down. Dark like we know dark here just does not happen. 1am? Still looks like twilight. 4am? Full on sunrise. Either way, the trip was great. I’m not going to go into great detail about everywhere we went, but we saw several castles and drove all over the island. A few notable bits below:

• The grounds at Crathes Castle are gorgeous, and the large red squirrels everywhere would have entertained Abbey for years.
• The castle in Edinburgh is hugely impressive, as is the giant rock outcropping under it.
• One day I must camp in the Scottish highlands.
• Our tour guide at the Glen Ord distillery was pretty funny. He says he gave up on whisky snobs the moment he read a review calling out flavors of “butter fried spices” and that if you pay your good money for a bottle of Scotch drink it any damn way you please. I’ll still drink it straight.
• There is livestock everywhere, and the food is great.

Coming home was fairly trouble free aside from the cab driver that took us to the wrong hotel in London. The plane was unusually hot inside so instead of sleeping the entire flight I just stayed up the majority of the time. On the return jetlag still wasn’t a problem. I’ve kept myself busy developing film and running errands.

Since I’ve finished scanning and uploading all of my 35mm film from the trip, I’ll go ahead and post my favorites as well as a slideshow to the set of everything on Flickr. I’ve also finished developing all of my B&W medium format film, but I haven’t scanned any of it yet – check back in a week or so for new favorites from that camera. Two weeks from now I should have the color medium format film back as well, so check back again then too.

A few weeks ago I bought myself copies of Ansel Adams’ instructional books on photography. “The Camera” was a quick read and contained little information with which I was not already familiar. As of right now, I am about two thirds of the way through “The Negative” and I’ve learned quite a lot. Several sources I’ve read attempted to explain the Zone System in summary. None of them ever made as much sense as the chapter dedicated to the Zone System in “The Negative.” Today, I took a trip into the back yard to try my hand a visualizing the values I wanted to see, deciding how to expose my film after carefully using my light meter, and then actually exposing the film. The results are quite encouraging. Quick scans are below, but next week I will be enlarging these negatives in the darkroom.

Well, the Velvia is back from Fuji. Wal-Mart says the turnaround is two weeks, but so far it hasn’t ever taken that long. Anyway, before I ran a roll of Velvia through the PepsiCam (my pinhole camera) I searched for some information on the reciprocity effect. I found a table, wrote down the appropriate information on a note-card and taped it to the back of the camera. Most of the exposures were at least 30s long, and it worked out very nicely. I think the camera cost a whole $7 to make. Results?

Coffee is disgusting. The smell, the taste, the stains it leaves in unsealed tile when field-grade officers spill it all over the floor without even attempting to clean up after themselves (that’s what they make privates for). All of it is just vile. Until last night, I was fairly convinced that if I happened to take over the world one of my first acts as Supreme World Commander would be the banning of any more coffee production. Then I used it to develop film.

Now, I won’t claim this was an original idea. I’m not even sure, in this age of information, that original ideas even exist anymore. A handy website, Caffenol.org, provided some nice examples and a few recipes. The necessary ingredients? Instant coffee, washing soda, vitamin c, and water. Water comes out of the faucet, you can get washing soda (not to be confused with baking soda) at ACE Hardware, and I needed groceries anyway so HEB solved the rest of my ingredient needs.

The recipe I used called for 6tsp of instant coffee, 4tsp of washing soda, and .25tsp of vitamin c all dissolved in 350mL of water. It was recommended that the coffee and washing soda be mixed in separate solutions to later be combined for a total volume of 350mL. The soda was dissolved in 200mL of water, and the coffee in 150mL. Swishing the water and coffee around to dissolve it all caused quite a lot of foam. Bubbles and even development are not friends with each other, so I had to let it sit for a long while before I decided to pour the terrible smelling developer into my film tank.

My test roll was one of the 20 rolls of Agfa APX 400 I was given a few weeks ago. I did not really bother metering anything, and just guessed at the exposures using my Kodak Retina IIa. When I shoot test rolls, I like to try and cram a wide range of contrast levels, lighting, and textures into a single roll and then see how my normal development process works for the general case. That’s exactly what I did with this roll, and the results were surprisingly good. The only issue, other than the horrid smell, is a fair amount of base fog but the film is old and expired and my scanner really doesn’t seem to care if the base is fogged or not. Apparently adding a few grams per liter of iodized table salt to the solution helps to control fogging, so I will give that a shot on the next roll. Actually, I’ll probably develop a roll of the APX 400 in my regular chemistry just to see how much of the fogging is really caffenol’s fault.

Results:

My first task when I finished my finals was to get busy building my darkroom. Two and a half days after I started, I had a fully functional darkroom.

The build was fairly straight forward. The two doorways into the room would need to be blacked out. Tables for both the enlarger and the developing trays would need to be built. A rack to dry my prints on would also need to be built. The room would require ventilation to avoid catching a case of instant death from toxic fumes. None of it was particularly difficult to build, though getting it all up the stairs and crammed into one small space was tricky.

Anyway, it all works and I just spent the last three hours of my life in that darkroom making prints of some of my favorite negatives. Now that I’ve eaten, I’m on my way back in to finish washing and drying the prints I’ve already made. Rather than inline a ton of images, here’s a Flickr slideshow of the build.

I’ll scan some of the prints later.

Gatorade and a few other sporting brands have taken to dramatic lighting in their ad campaigns for several years now. The number of times I’ve read questions about how to achieve such lighting answered simply with softbox has grown so large I’ve decided to go ahead and answer the question with an explanation I hope someone will find more useful than softbox.

First of all, you don’t need a softbox. Any spill-controlling light source you can get close to your subject will do. Zach Arias likes to use a collapsed bounce umbrella and a hotshoe flash like a small softbox. You can make a softbox out of a cardboard box lined with foil and covered with a white trashbag if you really want to. Do you have a large beauty dish with a diffuser? That will work too. Your options are only as limited as your imagination so long as you’ve got a means of providing a large apparent light source that controls spill and can be placed very close to your subject.

Why does the light source need to be close to your subject? If you take light intensity as a function of distance the value decreases rapidly as distance increases. Outside of my engineering courses I don’t know very many people who even remotely care about the science behind that fact, or the math used to describe it, so I won’t go there. If you want a quick practical example turn the lights off in your room and shine a flashlight at your hand, then shine it in the far corner of the room. It’s going to be significantly brighter against your hand. Your flashes emit light, and light is light. It all behaves the same way.

Now, let’s review some basics of flash photography. Aperture controls flash. Shutter speed controls ambient light. Shooting at your max sync speed (1/200s on my Canon 5D Mark II – ask Google if you don’t know your max sync speed) will kill the ambient light, leaving your flash to do all of the work. To make this work, go with a small aperture – say f/8 or smaller. Combine all of that with a light source very close to your subject and you’ll get light that goes from bright to dark in less distance than the width of my head.

Example #1 – ISO 250, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 2x Vivitar 285HV hotshoe flashes @ 1/4 power into collapsed Westcott 43″ Soft Silver umbrellas:

Two Lights

Lighting Diagram for Example #1:

Lighting Diagram

Example #2 – ISO 100, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 1x Einstein 640 @ 1/96 power (-6.5f) into a 28″ Fotodiox beauty dish with diffuser:

Beauty Dish

Lighting Diagram for Example #2:

Lighting Diagram

There you have it. Get in close with a large apparent light source, shoot at your max sync with an appropriate aperture. If you want more light to spread across your subject open the aperture up, if you want it to spread less close it down. Alternately, you can control how far the light travels across your subject by varying the power of your strobe. For reference sake, you don’t need a huge room with black walls to do this. Both shots above were taken in normal bedrooms. The first was taken during the day with a window open, and I forgot to reduce the ISO from the product photos I took moments earlier. Post-processing was limited to a preset that simulates Kodak Tri-X black and white film. Honestly, the preset overdrives the highlights far more than it kills the shadows. Control the spill, and get in close – you can get this effect nearly anywhere.

My good friend Angela is trying to sell her house and asked if I would come take some photos for her. I’ve never done that sort of work before, but she promised food and beer so I agreed to give it a shot.

Let’s go ahead and add a vintage light-meter to my growing list of photography equipment older than I am.

My lack of interest in super-close-up photography led me to trade the extension tubes I had for my Pentax 6×7 (which I’ll also likely get rid of) for a perfectly working Gossen Luna-Pro. Roaming the house taking incident and reflective measurements with both the Luna-Pro and my Canon 5D Mark II yielded the same exposure information (for reflective) and great exposures (incident).

Trading what you don’t want, and will never use, for something you may not actually need but could still get some use out of? Definitely winning.

Another vintage film camera has made its way into my hands. This one is a also German made, and sports a coupled rangefinder, a coated 50mm f/2 lens, and a Synchro-Compur leaf shutter. The frame counter is broken, but everything important works just fine.

Kodak Retina IIa

From the test roll

A tripod, cable release, maybe a hair too much beer, and a charged up Vivitar 285HV can yield some interesting results. I may have to do this again in the future with a more clear (read: sober) plan for where I’m going to fire the strobe.

Long exposure at The Ginger Man - Austin

Then there’s my fence, which isn’t really showcasing anything special at all unless you consider I developed this roll in Ilford DD-X I’ve reused way more than a few times and it still came out pretty nice.

Fence