Hi all,
well, after over 30 years of photography of all sorts, I've finally purchased and now shot my very own large format camera thanks to the great encouragement from many of you and many more hours of reading posts here. I bought a Chamonix 045F-1 (4x5) along with a number of lenses and a geared head for my tripod (Manfrotto 410 + 055 Pro). Lenses are: Schneider 210/5.6, Schneider 150/5.6, Nikkor 90/4.5 SW and a new Schneider 72 XL (against the advice of many more experienced photographers who recommended getting to grips with LF, one lens at a time...). Oh well!
Yesterday morning I headed off to do something no one has ever done before. I was off to shoot Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House etc. At least I thought it was a novel idea. Noone else was within "coo-ee" with a 4x5, that's for sure!
Armed with a single roll of Tri-X 400 and a Sinar Zoom 2 back, my primary aim was to get well exposed (no blow-outs in the clouds and hopefully some good shadow detail) and sharp images with less concern about composition - I had only an hour to shoot the 6 frames and also wanted to practice some lens shift for perspective correction and a bit of Scheimpflug focus shifting.
This morning I scanned all 6 images (the roll was developed for me yesterday) on a Flextight at 3,200 ppi in FFF, ie. raw unconverted 16bit x RGB channels. They were then converted to PSB, de-spotted (these become my final RAW images), converted to B&W using ColorPerfect and a slight bit of curves adjustment applied.
[Please forgive me if I make a terrible gaff on my first image uploads. I have reduced these to 1200px wide (from 17,000px wide) and done some JPG compression. Hope this is OK...]
Here is one of the first frames:
Shot with the Nikkor 90/4.5 SW and used a bit of front swing to keep the whole bridge sharp. Metered off the brightest bit of cloud and exposed 2.5 stops down from there. Next time I would deal with the obvious keystone using rise perhaps...
Again with the Nikkor 90 and this time attempted to use Scheimpflug to keep the nearest spike and the Opera House in focus. Almost...
Straight on with the Schneider 210/5.6. About 2cm front rise to correct for perspective.
And finally a 100% crop from the previous shot. Locals will recognise Cafe Sydney above Circular Quay.
So there are some of my first LF frames. Plenty of work to be done but I've never held a negative with so much information, and these are only 6x12s! I've also shot a few Portra 160 4x5s and they are simply incredible to me.
Many thanks for your time and I hope to bump into some of you in LA in the next week or so!
Cheers,
David
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