Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DaveF
Sadly, digitally scanned and printed. No prospect for a darkroom or even home-processing at this point.
Why sadly? I moved from film to digital and back again, keeping the digital part in scanning the negative. Each time You make a radical move (film to digital or vice versa) it takes a large amount of time and effort to develop your own skills. For this I decided to stick to scanning until I feel comfortable enough with creating the negative. I experienced I will never reach perfection, but feeling comfortable with a medium and changing two at once seems too much, at least to me. Printing a negative in the traditional way is an art all by itself!
As to your image: a lot of comments have been given allready, not much to add but to the composition: the foreground, to me, has a doubtfull role: not being there as a prominent foreground, nor being there as a well balanced part of the picture. Personally I would have either used the stone at the right more as an image border in combination with more grass in the foreground, or used the stone in it's full stature with less foreground: depending on the message You have to tell. Difficult to say when You haven't been at the scenery.
Most important of all: keep your passion alive by trying the huge amount of possibilities. More then enough in restricting yourself in film to the negative-part only, leaving printing to the ink-jet procedure.
Great to see You move from a D800e to film. Keep us updated in your experiences, how irrelevant they may seem to You!
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Thanks again for the comments.
The reason why I'd like to work with this one with a single exposure on film is because of the exposure blending: any movement in the trees causes havoc with the blending, meaning that I can't really print this image larger than this size because of the problems with the resolving and blending of the edges between sky and leaves: hence my interest in filtration.
Good thoughts about foreground. Regarding the stones and composition, they're all at different jaunty angles, and the camera was properly levelled when I took this shot. Originally the shot was slightly wider than this, the B&W result is a slight crop.
I haven't entirely given up on digital. I still have the D800E, an 85PC-E, 70-200f/4, and a couple of other macro lenses. But for LF I now have 75, 150 and 210 lenses.
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Recently, I have been trying to take a close-up of a frangipane flower which is a velvety flower that is, in the main, a brilliant white with a rather striking yellow centre. My most recent photo used a blue filter to try to separate the yellow and white on B&W film because the first photos had almost absolute zero difference right across the flower. It registered as a white.
So I've been thinking that perhaps the only (best) way for this subject would be to shoot a colour film and then convert to B&W later.
Perhaps this precious scene might also be one where tonal relationships are better preserved and controlled in the digital post-processing stage ? In which case graduated ND filters might not be such a bad thing. It would then be a case of doing several exposures and stitching them as was done with the original photo if I'm not mistaken.
I agree with standing a little further back with a slightly longer lens (~90mm ?) and perhaps cropping too.
Cheers,
Steve
1 Attachment(s)
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Well, over a year later and I have a result: the same scene, shot on a single sheet of Delta 100 5x4.
The sky was, on this occasion, much flatter than previously. I selected normal development with a Lee #16 yellow/orange filter (the lab developed the film so I had no control over that). The negative was still pretty flat, so quite a bit of post-processing with curves had to ensue, with a small amount of toning for the final result; not a bad result but perhaps some areas for improvement.
Anyway, I achieved what I wanted with movements: no messing about with DSLR focus bracketing.
Attachment 170473
St. Blane's Churchyard
Isle of Bute, Scotland
26th August 2017, about 8:30pm
Linhof Technikardan S45
Nikkor-SW 75mm f/4.5,
Ilford Delta 100, normal processing
Lee #16 Yellow/Orange filter
1/2" f/32
1º rear tilt back, 7º front tilt forward, 14mm rear rise
7mm front shift left, 4º front swing right
Digitized with D800E/85PC-E and Novoflex Castel-L, 4 frames stitched in CS6.
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Good job, Dave. I'm glad it worked out!
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Thanks! As I say, not the best but given the opportunity did what I needed at the time.
Re: Question about a specific subject and composition
Scan twice, one for shadows, and one for highlights. Show us your final result, I'd like to see it.