DigitaLens – next generation photography

It’s been a while since my last post. No excuses, I just didn’t make the time to work on it. Since my last post in November 2011, I have been to Japan for the fall colors and Hawaii for some family visits. Both were lots of fun and I also took my Fuji GF670 with me. Together, I shot about 30 rolls of 120 Portra/Ektar. Most of my Japan film were processed using the Unicolor kits. For my Hawaii film, I decided to try the Rollei digibase C41 kit. Unlike the Unicolor powder kit, the digibase is a liquid kit that will mix into 1000 ml volume and will keep for many weeks. I ran about 16 rolls through the kit and should have at least 4 more left. Should be interesting to see if the chemistry does in fact keep it’s potency over time.

For my processing session with the Hawaii film rolls, I decided to try and create a better temperature control system. Processing 2 rolls at a time with each taking about 30-45 minutes each, and keeping the chemistry at 38°C is challenging. The actual chemistry time is only 17 minutes, but you need to factor in wash and load time for the next 2 rolls and you end up taking a total of 45 minutes per two rolls. For the temperature control, I decided to gamble and buy a fish aquarium heater and see if I could modify it to go to 100°F (normally stops at 94°F). I purchased a Eheim Jager Aquarium Thermostat heater at 150w for $29. I also bought a small water pump (to circulate the water), the kind used for garden fountains. For this I found a Sunterra pump for $9. Both from Amazon.com. I was able to just break off the plastic limiting tab at the top of the heater and continue turning the rheostat pass it’s stop mark and get it to maintain 100°F. Here’s a shot of my very simple but effective heat bath:

Nanzenji - Kyoto

Nanzenji- Kyoto

Nanzenji-Kyoto

Arashiyama-Kyoto

Nanzenji-Kyoto

Images from Hawaii:

Hawaii Prince Hotel dining

Haiku Gardens - Kaneohe

Waikiki Sunset

Haiku Gardens - Kaneohe

Waikiki sunset - Processed with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

I’m getting ready for another trip. This time back to Japan to see the autumn colors (Koyo). I’ve specifically timed this trip to make it to Kyoto during the peak of the fall season (at least I hope so). In addition to my M9, I’ll be packing my newly acquired GF670 and will selectively shoot with this camera.

I decided to take mostly color negative film on this trip, reasoning that shooting color will offer me the most flexibility to print in either color or B&W. Using my hybrid system, analog film with digital scanning/printing, I can make choices later and not be stuck with B&W only. Also, using Nik Software’s “Silver Efex 2″ has really got me spoiled with what I can get from a color digital image.

I’ve shot Tri-X as well as Portra with this camera, processing the Tri-X at home and sending out the Portra color film out for processing and scanning. The cost/frame to do this is pretty extreme, considering the number of shots I get from a roll of film. I’ve gotten to be pretty consistent in my B/W processing where I can bang out two rolls in less than 30 mins. I’ve used a couple of pro processing services for color and the best deal I could find is $15/roll, processed and scanned. Still pretty expensive when compared to my B&W processing.

So I did some investigating and after viewing someone use a C41 process on You Tube, I decided to try some chemistry from Jobo. For less than $20, I get enough chemistry to process 8 rolls of 120. Thats less than $3/roll. If I do it right, I can squeeze out a couple more rolls for a total of 10 (provided I do all the processing on the same day and not let the chemistry sit.)

It turns out to be pretty simple. Three chemicals: Developer, Blix, and Stabilizer. Most critical is the developer, it has to be at 102˚F. This is a little cumbersome but I got it going without too much effort. The trick is to have a bath that the chemistry sits in to keep a stable temperature. Some samples:

Bike on Balboa Island

Old Santa Ana Court House

The old West End Theater (1815) Santa Ana, CA

Buying camera equipment during the 70′s usually involved some guessing and lots of reading before ordering. Living in Hawaii at that time left little opportunity to see, touch and compare equipment. I remember waiting every month for the new issue of Popular Photography to read about new equipment being reviewed. Even more exciting was looking at all the ads in the back to compare prices to those New York stores that always seem to have the best prices. At that time, I was working as a young computer sales person (before anybody knew what a computer was) and was lucky to have some travel for training to Pasadena California. There was always one store in Pasadena that had multipage ads, with very good prices and lots of pictures to compare and that was Frank’s Camera in Highland Park. Right between downtown LA and Pasadena along the 110 (death trap) freeway. I always took a few hours to visit the store during my two week stints of training. I recently was passing Highland Park on the same deadly 110 and decided to pull off and see if the store was still there. It was, but in pretty bad condition as it appears to have been abandoned. It’s sad, but sign of the times I guess. I still remember the crowds of people waiting anxiously to checkout equipment at the busy counters.

Been looking at a  lot of medium format stuff lately and very impressed with the dynamic range and quality of those images. I had a bunch of 6×6 and 645 negatives in my storage for years (from shooting with my then Hasselblad 500cm and Bronica 645) and started to scan them before they get hit by the ravages of time.  I never realized how nice the tonal range a large negative can give you. So I did it, I got a Fuji GF670 6×7 & 6×6 format film camera. My first “folder” and a nice one indeed. Beautiful lens and nice compact design. I really like it. Some unboxing shots with a sample from my first roll of Kodak Portra 400. Really love the tonal range of this film!

Luke, 1yr

During our China trip I created this Tianmen mountain pano using my M9 with a shaved Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye. I decided to take my fisheye with me on the China trip but left my tripod and Precision Atome Panorama Head back home in keeping with the “travel light” theme. Instead, I used a string attached to the lens via a velcro on the lens with a metal ring on the other end. The attachment on the lens is approximate of the nodal point and the ring at the bottom, keeps me at the same spot (and height) as I rotate 90 degrees for each of the four shots. I had a bubble level on the flash shoe to keep everything level. Took a little doing with the wind blowing and the cold (50 deg) weather. Not a perfect pano but not bad for a hand held shot. You can see the ring at the Nadir, I did not photoshop it out.

Tienmen Mountain - Zhangjiajie

Pano

This ancient art has been performed in the streets of China for over 300 years. The art of face mask changing is a family secret passed on from generation to generation, only among the males of the family for fear of losing the secret, as the female is married off to another family. During our visit to Chengdu, we got our chance to see the famous Sichuan Opera, of which Bian Lian was the highlight of the show. Interestingly, this show had two females as part of the act.

Janice used her new Sony DSC HX9 to film this segment. (More about this camera later.) Pay particular attention to the beginning, as you will see some amazing costume changes.

We decided to go to China again this year. In the last 5 years, we’ve made 4 trips there, this time returning to Zhangjiajie but going for the first time to Mt. Ermei, Chengdu, Guilin, Yangshuo and Longshen. Longshen and visiting the Longji Rice Terraces as well as the “Face Mask Changing” show in Chengdu were really special for me. The amazing Sichuan Opera Show, featuring the face mask changing, was nothing short of amazing. Having the ability to photograph the performers preparing for the stage, was an added bonus. Our journey to Longshen was a little challenging (with lots of switch backs, as the bus navigated lots of hairpin turns) but very relaxing once we got there. Staying at a hotel right at the top of the Longji Rice Terraces was special and made it convenient to enjoy the early morning hike. While the hotel was much less than a 5 star one, we still enjoyed the quiet and peaceful countryside. We had a special treat after the lights went out, a fire fly buzzed the room, in a pitch black moonless night, making it look like a flying flashlight.
For this trip, I decided to take my M9 and four lenses: 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 90mm. I found myself using my 24mm and 35mm most of the time. The 50mm and 90mm were used about 10% of the time. While planning for the trip, I wrestled with deciding to take my M6 film camera but later decided that with the six flight legs we had to take, I didn’t want to deal with the hand inspection of the film, especially through the Chinese security.

During my early days of photography, I owned an enlarger and chemistry to process film and paper. I, however, did not follow the traditional path of first shooting black and white then graduating to color. Just at that time, Ilford had just released a new chemistry called Cibachrome which allowed the average home user to print and process their own color prints from slides. So I started with E6 (slide film) processing and did my printing with Cibachrome chemistry until kids came along and work required my undivided attention.  Black and white just seem so boring and I wanted to step into the state of the art at that time. I completely bypassed that black and white thing and never got to appreciate what B&W was all about. Many years later and with lots of exposures behind me, I now understand what B&W can convey. Not that I’m an expert at it, but I am learning stuff that I should have known before. Lots of neat concepts like color filters for contrast control, dynamic range control via film developing temperature/time. I’m still a newbie, but having fun learning photography all over again has given me a new insight to what B&W is all about.

Now armed with a new scanner and a film body, I bought some Fuji Neopan 400 and a couple of rolls of Ilford XP2 to see what I could create. I wanted to try the Ilford XP2, as this is a C41 process (what they call Chromogenic) film, which means I can drop this off at Costco and pay them $1.59/roll to process with the rest of the color film. For the Neopan, I went out and purchased some chemistry and a new film tank. Processing B&W is not difficult. Water temperature is easy, most of the time the tap water here is pretty close to 68F. This is convenient and doesn’t require me to adjust. If it is 1 degree up or down, I just change the develop time. I can crank out 2 developed rolls in 30 minutes. I think what surprised me the most with this process is how large a latitude I got in the exposures. Shadow areas were not blotchy and highlights were not burned out. The film tends to be very forgiving with exposure errors. For the most part, I’m using my hand held Gossen Digisix meter in incident mode, but I also tried to use the “sunny 16″ rule to see how good I was guessing. For the most part, they all worked out, though some Lightroom adjustments were necessary. As for the Ilford XP2, Costco is not the best place to send your valuable work. Both rolls came back with some minor scratches. Lucky this was only a test senario, so no big deal, but it would have been great if they came out perfect for $1.59. So here are a few shots (nothing to write home about) to see my progress.

Several months ago, I had the opportunity to acquire  a film Leica (M4-P) and embarked on a nostalgic trip back in time to film. I already had Leica lenses, why not get a film body to experience shooting silver based cellulose photography? The last time I shot film was in 1997 with my Nikon F2sb on a trip to China. Fast forward to today, people in the business tell me there has been a stabilization in loss film sales after years of decline. Seems it is now cool to be shooting film (diana). This is especially true in Japan, where there continues to be a vast interest in shooting/collecting film base cameras (Tokyo Camera Style). The used camera business is booming in Japan and I had the opportunity to visit a couple stores while there last fall 2010. It almost feels like all the film cameras exported from this country had been sucked back into Japan. It is estimated that better than 40% of all film Leica’s made in the world is now in Japan with China quickly becoming the next collectors haven. On a recent visit to Freestyle Camera in Los Angeles, the sales staff confirmed that film sales has started to climb back up. A whole generation of photographers, who only knew how to look at the back of a screen to shoot a photo, is now discovering the viewfinder.

So now a few months have passed and I’ve shot a few rolls during my Japan Fall trip.  I had both B&W and slide film processed by a local professional lab that still provided that service. While I had an inexpensive Canon flatbed scanner, I chose to have the B&W film scanned so I could compare my own scanning against the lab. Overall, the lab scanning was much better. (As expected.) Scanning the slides were much more difficult, especially trying to balance the color. My difficulty in getting a good scan was due to the old scanner/software I had. So I set out to see what was out there to scan film, replacing my old flatbed. With the big drop off in film sales over the years, available solutions were thin. Epson had a couple of high end flatbed scanners, and Nikon just discontinued their Coolscan series, however Plustek had a 7600 series that look promising. After reading a lot of conflicting reviews, I decided on the Epson 700. As it turned out, that was a mistake. The Epson 700/750 did an outstanding job on medium format film but not so well on 35mm. I just had a really difficult time with the scanner and luckily was able to return it. The used Coolscan market was going upwards to $2k for a 5000ed which is highly rated but no longer manufactured and out of my price range. The Plustek was reasonably priced, dedicated for 35mm scanning and packaged with Silverfast Ai software which really was my only option. Here are some results of my first attempt at scanning Fuji Velvia 100:

I’ve now taken the next step and decided to try my hand at processing my own B&W negatives. Seems pretty easy with a minimum of investment. Stay tuned as I navigate to this next part of my trip down the analog road.

It’s been just over a year, when I received my brand new M9. This was my first Leica and I had great expectations for this camera and lenses. It’s now been a year, and having the M9 at my side traveling to Vegas, Death Valley, Zion, China, Hawaii, and Japan, I have now formed some opinions about this camera. In addition to travel photography, I’ve done a lot of shots of my 2 year old grandson and did an informal wedding shots for my nephew in Hawaii. During this past year, I’ve pretty much left my Nikon D700 idle in my drawer and occasionally brought it out for shots that the M9 would not do well. i.e. macro shots.

Overview:
Let me just state that I absolutely love this camera. It has exceeded many of my expectations but it is not a perfect camera (is there one?) Would I buy this camera again given what I now know? Yes. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely.

Image Quality:
There is no doubt that the M9 combined with legendary lenses of Leica, just creates images that is second to none. I go back and look at my old images created by my Canon’s and Nikon’s and they simply don’t compare. The resolving power of the lenses and the ability of the M9 to capture the light is just not repeatable on my Nikon. This is not always evident on the digital screen, but very much clear on a 17×22 print.  The contrast and tack sharp images with beautiful bokeh is just not possible on my Nikon equipment. This statement is true up to (my opinion) 1600 iso. After that, the M9 starts to fall apart. I don’t think it is reasonable to be shooting at anything higher than 1600 iso on the M9. Lightroom 3.0 has made some big advances with luminance and color noise reduction and this has benefitted the M9 but I still think going beyond 1600 iso, the sensor is not capable of capturing a clean image.

Rangefinder Form factor:
I got this camera for its quality and size. Having to drag around 1+ pound lenses plus a camera body, just got me tired. The M9 with three lenses weight less than my 70-200 f/2.8 Nikkor alone. My travels during the past year was such a joy. I didn’t mind taking my camera everywhere we went and I had all my lenses with me.

Focusing:
No doubt, this was a big adjustment for me. Just learning to focus on the patch, then moving to compose took a lot of practice. I soon started to think more about depth of field relative to aperture/shutter speed and how this would aid in getting a sharp image. (This is particularly important when trying to shoot a moving 2 yr. old.) I’m still work-in-progress to perfect this but I do get a larger number of focused images than out of focus these days.

Electronics:
Leica has designed this camera to be as close as it can to its heritage rangefinder history but still step out into the new digital camera age. To some extent they have been successful but also failed in others. I’ve already talked about the limited ISO capabilities. Other areas include the poor auto white balance in artificial lighting, particularly fluorescent lights. I always need to manually balance the lighting before shooting or I will have a difficult time correcting the lighting later. The display on the back is also limited in quality and could be of higher resolution. The camera does not have a lot of buttons, so true to its culture, it is as close to a film rangefinder as you’ll get but still taking a digital image. With no built in flash, I’ve use the M9 with a elinchrom wireless sync trigger on a Nikon SB800 for my informal wedding shots and portraits of my grandson. This worked surprisingly well for me. I shot using everything in manual mode, that seem to be the easiest to control the outcome of balancing the light.

Summary:
This camera works for me. I predominately shoot travel, landscape, and people pictures. I don’t do sports or macro photography, and when I do, I’ll reach for my D700 (not very often). For me, this camera is not just about the M9 but also about the lenses. Together, they make beautiful images that I have not been able to create with my other cameras.  I’m sure there are other camera/lens combinations that will do the same, but for me, this is what I believe to be best for my photography. It will be interesting to see what the next Leica M and also the newly announced Fuji FinePix X100 will be like. I’ll need to save my pennies for that eventual upgrade.