by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 14, 2009 | Photography
Since moving into my current flat I’ve not really had a convenient place to develop film so have been putting the black and white shooting on the backburner.
During the last week though I for some other reason thought to ask the Snappy Snaps near me and sure enough they did do 120 black and white. Problem is they wanted ยฃ18/roll developed and scanned and want 3 days to do it in.
So I asked around and found out that the Snappy Snaps in Wardour Street London does it for ยฃ10/roll scanned on a standard 1 hour wait, that’s very good.
Below a scan direct from their scanner, I didn’t touch it in any way (click for full size):
You can see some more from this roll here it was taken on Ilford FP4 with my Bronica SQA, this is also the first time in over a year that I touched this camera so was fumbling around a bit, will get back into it now I think especially with a quick development place just 5 minutes from my office.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 30, 2008 | Photography, Photography Equipment
I’ve a fairly short history with film, only started on it in September 2006 and it’s pretty much taken over for me from much of my digital camera work.
Since September 2006 I bought quite a few bits of film camera equipment, lenses aside this is what I have:
The most recent additions are the bottom two, they’re medium format cameras and something I’ve been intending to get into for a while. I bought the Seagull on eBay for cheap to see if I like the format and have some great results with it, especially considering it cost only GBP40.
So after loving the medium format as a medium I decided to get a proper medium format camera, I decided on a SLR rather than a TLR so got the Bronica SQA, it’s a square format medium format camera with interchangeable lenses, backs and finders. You can even buy Polaroid or digital backs for it to.
We took it out yesterday during lunch for a quick test and I love the shots we got, it’s lovely to use though it has no light meter so I use one of my hand held light meters, the shot below and ones it links too were all done with a 1 degree spot meter and metered using the Zone Systems.
I love working with the medium format negatives, they are roughtly 6 cm x 6cm each with big generous borders between negatives. This makes working with them so easy, easy to cut, easy to handle safely without touching the photos etc.
I found my developing results with them were much better than with 35mm, maybe I have just been more careful, will need to see when I do my next 35mm and compare.
Since using film my general photography has improved a lot, I now find that I am forced to spend a lot more time thinking about a shot, putting up tripod, metering it by hand, looking at every bit of detail of the photo to do the metering correctly etc, my % of shots taken to shots that I love is much higher than before and as a result even my digital photography has improved. I take fewer shots and get many more keepers. I think I’ll be doing film work till they stop making it.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 17, 2008 | Photography
Flickr and The Library of Congress announced a project together to put a whole load of the Libraries photos up and to ask the public to create meta data for these photos – tags, notes etc.
This is a phenomenal achievement for Flickr in my mind, looking through these photos there are some really absolutely amazing shots showing American life in the early 1900s, depression years, the war etc.
I spent some time over lunch browsing some of these, the machinery, clothes, culture, cars, architecture, it is all just amazing I wish there were such a good record of the UK available to the public.
Some of the images are just great to look at like the one below from 1911, that’s a hand held large format camera, amazing.
Others show the truly amazing work that photographers did in those days and frankly makes me wish I can even come close to this kind of shot on my digital cameras.
Click on these images and look at them, they are phenomenally well done the richness and dynamic range of color in those shots far out paces the results I tend to see on digital. I wish self developing color slides wasn’t such a pain else I’d start doing medium format color transparencies right away.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 6, 2007 | Photography
I’ve always loved panoramas ever since I got my first Olympus camera that had the on-screen display for composing panoramas. It required – and Olympus still stupidly have this requirement – that you use only over priced Olympus memory.
Things have come a long way since with almost every point and shoot now having a on screen guide for doing panoramas and give away free software for it, but what to do with a DSLR?
There are several methods, you can do them yourself in photoshop or any of a number of apps that require you to carefully line up your photos and make little dots on them etc. but none of these compare to Autostitch in ease of use. You literally just point it at your photos and it does it all, you don’t even need to tell it what form the panorama takes.
The end result is a good quality JPG (quality is adjustable) that only requires cropping, below are some examples of what I’ve done with it in the past. It can not be easier to shoot them, no tripods or anything, just line them up.
Click on each for the flickr page, then click on All Sizes to see big versions of each shot.
I’d definitely suggest giving it a try, it’s a great way to get more detail in shots, look for example at the last one in detail you’ll see Emma in the shot bottom left to give you a sense of scale, that is 6 x 10 meg pixel images stuck together. More examples by me can be seen here and there is a Flickr Group as well with some excellent examples.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 12, 2006 | Photography
A few weeks ago moo.com launched a very nice service, they take your flickr photos and make small business cards using those photos.
They did a promotion where they gave batches of 10 away I got some of those as soon as they came out and have since bought 100. At US$19.99 it’s a steal – the equivalent of about GBP10.
The experience is overall great, the cropping doesn’t always come out exactly as expected I have 2 images that I literally just have to through away since they are spoilt but I put about 30 images in so that only really come to about 6 cards. My suggestion is just don’t crop with stuff too close on the sides, otherwise I can really recommend it if you want something different from the usual.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 27, 2006 | Photography, Usefull Things
I’ve always been a bit wary of buying stuff off eBay, something about it just always put me off. My recent acquisition of a old camera though is forcing me to give it a go.
I wanted a few things for the camera, a few more lenses I find 50mm a bit claustrophobic, it needs a leather case and some other bits. So I’ve been looking at eBay again. This past weekend I did my first purchase of a Schneider-Kreuznach Retina Tele-Xenar 135mm F4 Telephoto Compur Lens for my Retina IV camera, the item was a Buy Now and I was happy with the price so I got it.
The lens arrived this morning and is as good as new I’m very impressed with it, here is a shot of my camera with the lens fitted. It came in its original protective case and everything, not bad for GBP24!
I’ve also bought another Retina camera, this one is a Retina S, very similar to the IV but it includes 35mm and 85mm lenses, bags, kit bag and all the goodies even some thirdparty book on the Retina cameras. Still waiting for this one to arrive though.
The second auction wasn’t a Buy Now so I had to way up if I wanted to actually try and bid on it or not, in the end I decided to go with one of the Sniper services. I searched around, there are tons out there with payment options going from monthly, yearly, per item etc it was hard to choose which one. I eventually came across Gixen, it’s a free Sniper run by someone who is passionate about doing so and I felt happy to use his service rather than some company I guess it’s years of using Open Source. Anyway in the end I got the item after the sniper did it’s bid, now I am just waiting for the knock on the door.
