Thanks Jim. It is enchanted.
Thanks Jim. It is enchanted.
Jim (F) - looks like a lovely place - what lens?
Jim (G) (And I thought you kept all that stuff at your house :-) Is that on 5x7?
Is your Imagon in shutter or barrel? I have all three strainers for the 300mm in barrel and could give you precise details and/or scans if you wanted to try to recreate them - an opening mechanism would be tricky but you could do plates with the centre aperture, and ones with centre aperture + strainer holes. If it's in shutter with a front thread as a starting point you may be able to find cheap UV filters that have a removeable retaining ring (to remove the glass).
I work in a high school and have borrowed a very simple single meniscus from the science dept, mounting it using the same sort of filter ring, fitted to a HiTech filter adapter plate then taped to a Sinar board. It works out to be about a 380mm/f7.6 but this was closer and probably about f10. I still have a bit of a problem focussing and (due to closeness as well) a good deal of this is probably plain out of focus rather than soft focus. Not sure if the marks on the expired Rollei Ortho 25 are due to dev or the result of the film sticking slightly to the separating paper in the box (which it was).
Peter, nothing exotic just my Kodak 305 Portrait lens.
Peter, you are off to a good start with the soft focus work! The emphasis on shapes and tones for composition are more important than the lens choice. I like the first waterfall photo and your latest above. Determining which iris choice you want will come with experience. There is no definite best point of focus with SF. It's a gradual subjective choice.
Peter, my pic was on 6.5X8.5 ~ full plate. I cut my own film for the holders.
As to focus, I always tell people starting out to roll all the way through focus and out the other side, then come back slow watching straight lines with contrast. You'll see them get sharp long before the best "compromise" with focus and softness. In this case the white letters were my focus point with a tiny bit of back swing since I wasn't looking straight on and a bit of tilt to sacrifice the top of the picture in order to have more focus on the license plate. At this point, all quite mechanical and not really thought much about while I'm doing it.
I was wondering if the lens length vs film size was having an effect on the amount of glow you were getting, but 6.5X8.5 is close enough to 5x7 to rule that out...
Ahh! Great guidance, many thanks, I will practice this with some indoor static objects.
I was reading the Focusing Soft Focus Lenses thread the other day and have seen your post and the one following (on the 'black flex against a white wall' - another thing to try). I liked your observation on 'deer fever'. I tend to get over-excited even without a sitter and then forget simple things like adding some tilt to pull foreground rocks into focus :-)
I love the pictorialist meets modern style of Alvin Langdon Coburn's industrial photos, Stieglitz's "Hand of Man", etc.. Light and shape.
img507 by Jason Philbrook, on Flickr
7.25" verito, fp4+ film in pyrocat hdc. This is to be an electrical panel for a solar farm's grid interconnection. Nobody was working Sunday at the site, so I skipped a woods walk with my family and photographed this site with some LF and MF film.
Thanks Jim. Yes, my youngest has been most often the model.
This soft focus photo (with 7.25 verito) is mostly a photo of memories though it is rich with shapes and patterns. Old lakefront cottage, towel for swimming, chair for supervising.
img502 by Jason Philbrook, on Flickr
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