An 8x10 from Hidden Valley (pt. 1)

 Here is an 8x10 image I took with my Willtravel 8x10 3D printed camera today, Wednesday, January 13th, the day that Trump was impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives.

The images have problems (I use the plural because I will be posting another one after this one). It started out as a sunny day but the haze was moving in quick, so I had to be quick also. Still, it started out as sunny 16 weather, and I used an aperture of f22, and my orange filter also, but my shutter speed was too slow for this scene. I say slow because the images were overexposed by one or two stops. Instead of using a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second, I should have used 1/50th. I really had to brighten the scans of the negatives to be able to obtain anything, they were overexposed.

Here is one scene. The scan of the negative is not what the negative looks like. The negative basically has a black hole in the middle of the image where it was overexposed. I had to brighten my scan to be able to retrieve something.

And what is that dark band on the right side, you ask? Did I forget to remove the slide completely from the film holder? Of course not, how could I? It was a problem with the orange filter, it comes mounted (imperfectly) on a make-shift printed filter mount that is thoroughly inadequate for the job. The dark band is a small cord that is meant to attach the Cokin P filter to the filter attachment ring, but it should ordinarily be out of the way. I could not mount this filter correctly, so it shows up covering that edge, which means, I lost that part of the image. I really need a dedicated filter mount, not these make-shift solutions.

Oh, and what did I tell you about the haze? It was all over the sky, so we had no distinct cumulous clouds, just cotton candy that really didn't allow the San Gabriel mountains to stand out in the background. I will have to continue returning here to try to get that image, unfortunately. And my shadow, my shadow, my shadow. The sun is so low in the sky during the winter and this lens is so wide angle that my shadow is always in the images I take with this camera. I am debating looking for a timer device that I can attach to the shutter so that it waits for 10 to 20 seconds to trigger it, with that time being adequate for me to back way, way back so that my shadow does not appear.

Still, the image does look old-timey.