All Quiet on the Western Front

 It was quiet today. We were supposed to have a cloudy day, and it was mostly cloudy, but the sun did step out from time to time. I went out and walked, and there was a breeze that was blowing leaves all over the place. Some of the trees I pass on my walk are now mostly shorn of covering, but a few are still bright with fall colors. 

I went home and developed 2 8x10 negatives and 6 4x5 negatives. Then, I rested for a bit. It is 6:06 p.m. as I write this, and I have already eaten dinner. Here are a few scans.

This is the Heritage glass house at Santa Fe Springs. I was so overjoyed to see it did not have any light leaks. I will have to handle each film slide carefully as I remove and insert it into the film holder. But I can do that.

I am using Catlabs 80 black and white film. I still cannot hook my camera onto a tripod, the thread will not engage on the bolts, so I handhold the camera by holding it to my stomach/torso. I used an aperture of f22, and a shutter speed of 1/30. I try to estimate my composition by eyeballing it, I don't have a viewfinder and I can't use the ground glass (because I would have to have the camera mounted on a tripod to get the exact composition I want). I focused at about 20 feet away, and am using that as my standard now. The helical does not move easily, so there should be no problem with it altering that focus setting when I carry it in my bag.

Here is my other shot from Heritage Park, to complement the ones I published yesterday.

These are scanned with my Epson V600 in Office Mode, using a dpi of 1200 (which is the highest it has for this mode). What this means is, the scanner is preventing me from obtaining the highest resolution I would like to obtain in these scans, so I don't know how sharp focus really is. When I have a spare $1,200 I will buy an Epson V850, but I don't anticipate that happening in this year or the next. I am fine with that. I am not selling product, I am still learning the ropes of 8x10 photography, and what I want to practice is composition and development. 

I should mention that I am due to receive a few filters this Saturday. I am looking forward to using them with this lens and camera. They will be a yellow, an orange and a sepia filter. I would have preferred anything other than a sepia, but they came as a package on Ebay, that is, they were bundles together.

How much did I pay for them, you might ask? The princely sum of $26.43, including shipping and taxes. I am looking forward to using the orange filter especially, since I really want to darken those skies. I would have liked a red 25A, but the orange will do.