Here are two more photos I took with my 4x5 Travelwide yesterday. I had developed them but they had these violet stains that remind of when anti-halation layers do not wash off of the negatives. I left them to wash for a few more hours then hung them to dry overnight. In this case, I didn't even use Kodak Photo Flo, since I considered them wasted images since the stain did not come off. They were to be learning experiences, but after scanning them, they are not bad.
Once again, these are 4x5 negatives that I scan on my Epson V600. I do not have the ability to scan the true 4x5 size, I can only scan a strip of the negative, so they appear as 6x12 images, but rest assured, there are big areas of the images that are being cropped when I scanned. I cannot afford a V700 scanner right now, nor do I want to scan the different parts of each negative and stitch them together. That is when the labor becomes onerous, and I just want to compose images and practice developing my ability to read light. I am getting better at it, I used no light meter (I don't have one), and just try to guess using sunny 16 as a guideline. In this case, this is Arista 200 black and white film, so if it were sunny, it would be 1/200 at f16, but I knew it was at least four stops under in the shade. So, four stops is 1/200 --> 1/100 --> 1/50 --> 1/25 --> 1/12, and that was what I used. The good thing is that this is large format, and reasonably wide-angled (my Travelwide has a 90mm Super Angulon lens), so I can handhold even at those speeds. My negatives are well exposed, the first one being in the shade. The second one is, of course in bright sunlight, so it was 1/200. I want to continue to develop this ability to gauge exposure.
The bridge at the Japanese garden. I was being watched by people in a car on the road beside the garden. Of course they would watch me, I was almost the only person on campus. They were polite enough not to confront me, but yes, I did arose suspicion. I love this vantage point, love the artful arrangement of rocks in the stream. It was raining ash at the same time, but it doesn't show up in this image because the trees intercepted it. Step out from the trees and you would see the ash particles on your clothing or on a dark bag, and also, on the ground, just accumulating. This is California in September, when dreams are combined with ashes.
I had so much difficulty trying to find a composition here. I had two frames left and wanted to use them, but I would have had to climb into this little desert garden on the way to the parking lot. There were also cars in the lot that I didn't want to appear in the image, and also, signs and other evidence of living in a city. I clipped the tree in the middle. I am also getting better at zone focusing, just judging distances and closing down the aperture to get things in focus. I rarely shoot at lower than f16 anyway, but if you don't focus for nearby objects, it would get fairly annoying to have them appear as unfocused blogs in the foreground. I would have liked to climb into this areas to eliminate part of the open space but, of course, the underground security officers were watching me, and one was off to my left pretending to take photos of some flower bushes. I knew they were watching me so, like the old Elvis Costello song from the 80s, I was being watched by the detectives, so I concluded and left.
That was it. No trip to the California Botanic Garden. I was bushed. It was time for taquitos and the drive home on a Friday afternoon, under gloomy ash clouds.
No comments:
Post a Comment