Back then, the Gulf Coast wasn’t the overbuilt “Redneck Riviera” it has become, with hi-rise condos looming over every foot of beachfront. It was mostly small bungalows and no-tell-motels at ten bucks a night, run by grizzled retirees and sunburned refugees from midwestern winters. We’d pile into whatever Detroit-built chrome-blinged land barge Mom and Dad were driving at the time (I recall a preference in those days for Chrysler 440 4-barrel carbs, sucking 30-cent-a-gallon “ethyl” like an F-15 on afterburner) and head south and east from Baton Rouge until we picked up US 98 in Mississippi.

During the four- or five-hour trek—it always seemed like an eternity to us kids, stoked to a fever pitch of excitement by the sight of the Gulf and by the butter-slathered toasted day-old Krispy Kremes we’d bolted for breakfast—our first major landmark was Biloxi. There, we’d pass by the ruins of grand antebellum coastal mansions leveled by Hurricane Camille just a few years before. Down there, until Katrina punked-slapped it out of its place of disaster pre-eminence, Camille was spoken of for decades in hushed, apocalyptic terms. Everyone had a story about “Camille” (no “Hurricane” descriptor needed, just as with Katrina), and we heard them all over again every time we passed through Biloxi.

As I write this, I am amazed at the memories evoked by a ruined negative of a fiberglass facsimile of an extinct lizard standing mute by an Interstate. This post was to have been a short lament about a careless lab accident; look a what you, gentle reader, have endured instead. I am reminded once again of the power—so oft repeated it’s a bleached cliche—of images to move us. Maybe this is what lies at the heart of my fondness for images of kitschy Americana: that they stir in me, until now unconsciously, sentimental boyhood memories that are slowly darkening and dissolving—sort of like my ruined negative—as time swallows all.

I am further pleased that one of my fellow contributors to that issue, Tim Hyde, is featured in today’s Lens blog in the New York Times online edition. His work is exceptional; once again, I’m honored even to be in the same neighborhood.

Congratulations, Tim; and well-deserved props to Fraction and to what David and Joshua are doing with their labor of love.

And as for this blog: eventually I hope to be generating original content again, once life stops getting in the way of imagemaking, and of thinking about imagemaking.

Thank you, David Bram and Josh Spees, for inviting me to participate.

Check it out here and follow the link at lower right.

I shot the first roll in my Mamiya 7 on a gorgeous sunny day with wispy white clouds against an azure sky. For the most part the light was warm, late-day light with moderate contrast. I did my own processing in a Jobo ATL-1500 using Kodak Flexicolor C-41 chemistry. Painless and easy, as always. If you’ve ever handled Portra films, you’ll notice little difference with Ektar.

Kodak touts Ektar 100 as the world’s finest grained color film, and at least by a preliminary eyeball/loupe evaluation, I’d believe them. The grain is so small and smooth that, for all practical purposes, it is nonexistent. On the spectrum of film “looks”, in terms of saturation and tone—warm vs. cool—I’m still getting a feel for where this film fits. It’s definitely more saturated—especially reds and greens—and a bit warmer than the Portra VC line of films. At the same time, I find it to have a soft or muted quality that reminds me more of the Portra NC films. Strange. I’m sure much depends on the prevailing light; the examples I show below were all shot in late-day, warmer light, which has to make a difference. I’ve not shot it extensively in either noonday-sun or overcast conditions; some commentators have opined that it looks best in brighter, contrastier light. Others have compared it, in its strongly saturated colors, to Velvia. I don’t have much experience with that–or any other E6–film, so I’ll leave that call to others.

A couple of examples should give a feel for the film, at least in comparable light conditions (you ARE viewing this blog page on a color-profiled monitor, with a color-aware browser, aren’t you?)

The first image is straight from the scanner (Nikon 9000) with spotting and capture sharpening, and white balancing done on the paper plate. I made no other adjustments—the saturation and vibrance you see is what you get:

The image was shot in late afternoon; west is at about the three o’clock position, if the boy is at the center of the clock face and the house corner above his head is 12:00. The colors are warm, but saturated.

Next, the same image with the same adjustments as in the first version, but with black and white point, contrast, and clarity adjustments added. Still no changes in vibrance or saturation:

Finally, a late-day shot, with west over my right shoulder (note car shadow–I always stay in the car if I can help it!) as the sun sets. Again, the same array of adjustments as in the second example, but no changes to saturation or vibrance:

So just when I thought I’d settled on a solid stable of color negative films for all occasions—Fuji 160S and 400H as everyday mainstays, Portra VC’s when I want more punch—Kodak has to wreck things with yet another very nice film. However you characterize it—C41 Velvia, Portra NCVC—I can see making some freezer space for this one.

Kodak gets an attaboy.

Above, a frontal view of the lens/shutter on the camera. Notice the large the shutter housing, the black metal donut surrounding the lens. More typically the lensboard—the flat plate that holds lens and shutter, and supports the whole in the camera’s front standard—would be quite a bit larger than the shutter/lens assembly; you’d see a lot of board behind the shutter in a front-view shot like this, rather than a lot of shutter and lens, and little board. The camera’s Linhof-compatible boards (Linhof boards are a standard, and fit many smaller view/field cameras) are around 95mm square; while the diameter of this shutter is around 105mm. Look at the shutter housing at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions, and you can see it overhangs the front standards by several mm on each side. This shutter/lens assembly was intended for use on the much larger cameras that prevailed at the time; 8×10 inch cameras were about the smallest anyone used for “serious” studio work in the early 20th century.

Incongrously, the cocking lever (about three o’clock position on the front surface of the shutter housing) and the shutter release lever (about 7 or 8 o’clock) are small and dainty. The cocking lever, especially, barely extends beyond the rim of the shutter housing, so it’s tough to get at.

Above, a side view of the shutter housing (black knurled circular band of metal with serial number). Usually, this housing would lie closely against the lensboard behind it; here, notice several millimeters of offset; otherwise, the shutter would not clear the front standard (the stuff that holds the lensboard in place), the shutter’s diameter is so large.

Above, a closeup view of the aperture scale; like LF lenses in general, it’s not particularly fast, with a maximum aperture of f/4.5; but it stops down to f/45. Such small apertures are needed to make possible sufficient depth of focus with large-format lenses, so this is typical.

It’s not well shown in this view, but just above and between the “8″ and the “11″ on the aperture scale there’s a brass button slider. This is the shutter’s speed-range selector; at its far-left unmarked position, the shutter is set for speeds of one second or faster, chosen on the shutter speed dial (image following next.) The shutter must be uncocked in order to select “B” or “T”, and forcing it risks damaging the shutter. Moving the selector to “B” or “T” overrides whatever speed happens to be selected on the shutter-speed dial. Set to “B”, the shutter stays open as long as the shutter release lever is pressed; on “T”, one press opens the shutter, and a second press closes it. These two settings, of course, are used for longer exposures. With the slow (relatively light-insensitive) films in use way back when, and the small apertures required for meaningful depth of focus, exposures of seconds’ to minutes’ duration were common.

Above, the shutter-speed selector dial of the Compound shutter, which is now accurate and smooth as silk since SK Grimes worked its magic. My only quibble is that the knurled ring is small and flat, and tough to rotate between speed settings. Speeds range from 1 sec to 1/75 sec, attainable when the speed-range selector pictured in the previous image is at its far-left unmarked position. The cylinder atop the shutter housing, on its side behind the speed selector dial (labeled “CP Goerz”), is a pneumatic-piston device that regulates the slower shutter speeds. It contains a plunger that, when the shutter is tripped, forces air out through a small orifice, delaying shutter closing by a measurable duration that varies depending on the chosen shutter speed. When the air has been forced out of the piston, the shutter closes, ending the exposure. This works only for the slower speeds. Clever—simple and reliable. The shutter calibrated well and its speeds checked out accurately throughout its range. Note the cable-release extension entering the shutter housing at about the 11 o’clock position.

In short, I am loving this gadget. It is a thing of functional beauty. I expect to have more images, and excruciatingly boring levels of technical babble, posted here in coming days and weeks.

Insomniacs, your cure is imminent.

After nearly a month at SK Grimes getting worked over, my new/old Dogmar 10-3/4″ lens—it doesn’t sound right to call it a 10.75, as firmly ensconced in the analog world as this thing is—and its mated Compound #4 shutter finally returned to me via Brown Truck. Two days of skanky weather yielded to dry, if overcast, conditions a couple of days ago, so I broke it out for a trial run.

Grimes, as usual, did a heck of a job on it. They did a CLA and partial rebuild on the Compound shutter, whose speed-selector dial and aperture lever had been nearly immovable. They also cleaned the lens and remounted the whole in a Linhof-compatible lensboard with a slight forward offset to enable it to clear the front of my Chamonix 45n-1 camera. It looks great, and now functions smooth as silk.

I have no experience with a lens/shutter this age, and didn’t know what to expect. The lens is uncoated, as far as I can tell; the shutter is calibrated in the old-style speeds: 1/75, 1/50, 1/25, 1/10, 1/5, 1/2, 1 sec, B, and T. In order to shift the shutter to “T”—also the only way you can open the shutter to compose and focus—it must be uncocked; before the rebuild, this interlock was loose enough to allow T selection while cocked, a serious no-no, and the principal way many of these old shutters were damaged by unschooled users like myself.

The whole apparatus is heavy; it’s a big chunk of glass and steel, with an industrial feel and look. The shutter housing’s diameter is nearly the same size as the lensboard square dimension; viewed from the subject’s position, the objective looks like a giant Cyclopean eye in the diminutive forehead of the Chamonix. Luckily the camera’s front movements lock down tightly enough to keep everything properly aligned despite the weight of this rig. Incongruously, the shutter-cocking and release levers are dainty and awkward for my fingers to find, so I’m stumbling around and fat-fingering stuff as I get the workflow down with this beast. There’s a lot of shifting back and forth between the front and the rear of the camera to operate the shutter controls and adjust stuff; this should improve with practice.

With all that, what about the images it produces? In a word, stellar, despite the feckless machinations of the camera operator.

I shot 6 sheets of B&W film during my first trial run. The two I managed to expose correctly and get into focus (boy are my LF muscles flabby and out of practice!) look fantastically sharp and contrasty. Two of the others were torpedoed by subject (10-yr-old boy) movement during the f/22-1/2 and 1/2-sec exposures; and two were laid waste for want of BEF: Bellows Extension Factor. That is, I was close enough to my subject—about six feet—that I needed to add additional exposure to compensate for bellows extension, and failed to do so. (I didn’t actually measure the extension, but this had to be the reason; another shot of a house across the street, shot in the same light with exactly the same aperture and shutter speed, but much less bellows extension, was properly exposed.) Another image was partially transparent, where bellows pressed downward by my carelessly-placed darkcloth had blocked light from the lower half of the subject from exposing the film. Yep, at a buck and change per sheet of film, I’m paying a bit of stupid tax here.

Today’s efforts were more fruitful, as demonstrated in the above image. My subject was compliant, even eager, so enforcing stillness was no problem. And stillness is crucial when your shutter is open for the relative eternity of one-fifth of a second, and your zone of sharp focus is only about 5 inches, front to back. I somehow remembered to add an extra BEF stop to the metered exposure value, since I was pretty close to her; to get the film out of the lightproof holders and into the daylight developing tank without exposing it to light; to get it processed more or less accurately; and finally, to get a decently sharp scan.

I am thrilled to have this lens in my bag. It is a gorgeous piece of industrial-optical sculpture, and its images are splendid, in spite of the photographer. Its focal length is nearly ideal for large-format portraiture. I expect it will see a lot of use.

This means that for images shot on film, there are extra steps involved: processing, which I do in an automated Jobo processor; and scanning, to render an analog film image as a digital file that can be corrected and printed, just like those straight from a digital camera. I have been quite happy, both technically and aesthetically, with the results I’ve enjoyed via this hybrid workflow. Naturally, then, it’s time to throw a wrench into the machinery.

After a hiatus of nearly twenty years, I decided last fall to dust off my old Sinar F 4×5 and see if I still knew how to use it. I think the initial inspiration for this impulse was revisiting, for the umpteenth time, Avedon’s In The American West. I marveled once again at his stunning portraiture, with the tonal richness that can be delivered only by large-format cameras like the 8×10 Deardorff he schlepped around for years to complete that project.

So out came the Sinar. I cleaned it up and shot a few sheets of film, and procured a Fuji pack-film adapter for it—the only instant-film alternative left, now that Polaroid is deceased. So far so good. Further experimentation indicated that I’d really be better off with a portable alternative to the field-cumbersome monorail Sinar; hence, the Chamonix 45n-1 that arrived a month or so ago, of which I’ve written in previous blog posts here and here. I had sent my Sinar shutters and lenses for CLA during the Chamonix’s slow transit from the People’s Republic of China; and remounted them its smaller Linhof-compatible lensboards. [n.b. The Sinar is for sale.] Though I’m still getting accustomed to the feel and ergonomics of the Chamonix, and reacquainted with the deliberate and methodical workflow demanded by large-format shooting, I’m satisfied with the film images I can produce with this rig.

It is only now, alas, that I’ve given adequate thought to what comes after I expose a sheet of film. The Jobo processor handles up to 12 sheets of 4×5 film per batch with aplomb, so developing color or black-and-white film is brainlessly easy; it’s the scanning of such large film sheets that is the problem. And while my film scanner, a Nikon 9000, does a stellar job with my medium-format images shot on 120 roll film, it can’t handle any image larger than 6×9 cm; the film simply won’t fit into the scanner. I would be pleased to be able to achieve with 4×5 film scans the level of quality I enjoy from the Nikon with my smaller negatives. That’s gonna hurt.

Quality is expensive in photography; and near the top end, incremental further improvements in quality are hideously expensive. I own a high-quality “prosumer” flatbed scanner that does a passable job scanning medium- and large-format film—albeit with quite a bit of MacGuyver-ing to get the best out of it. The Nikon produces substantially higher quality, properly configured, than the flatbed—and costs three times as much. To achieve a comparable quality improvement over the flatbed with 4×5″ film would require jumping to the next level, such as an Imacon virtual-drum scanner. These cost at least $5000-8000 if you can find a decent used one; and as much as $12-20,000 new. Real drum scanners provide even higher quality—and new or used, cost at least as much as the Imacon, and probably far more. Plus, I’m not sure anyone would call them particularly user-friendly.

So what are my 4×5″ output options? (If you can think of others, let’s hear them!)

1. Analog printing in the darkroom: requires darkroom and related accoutrements ($$); requires an enlarger and some related impedimentia ($$) unless 4×5″ contact prints are large enough (not usually); can print any size I want within reason; analog workflow (plusses and minuses); excellent print quality.

2. prosumer flatbed scanning: cheap to own; scans are accessible; mediocre to decent output quality; gewgaws required for maximum quality are fussy to use.

3. high-end scanning: $$$$ to own; outsourcing inconvenient, expensive, and not readily available in my area; highest image quality.

I am really a bit stuck with this right now. I love shooting film, and I am committed to continuing to do so. But finding no viable solution to this impasse could force me to re-evaluate whether LF film photography makes sense at all for me. It might be that selling that gear and optimizing my MF film gear makes more sense.

There’s very little point in going to the trouble to make an excellent 4×5″ negative if the end product is inferior to that from a smaller negative I can actually afford to scan well.

Share on Facebook]]> http://www.michaelsebastian.com/blog/2009/04/large-format-film-to-digital/feed/ 5 http://www.michaelsebastian.com/blog/2009/04/amon-carter-visit/ http://www.michaelsebastian.com/blog/2009/04/amon-carter-visit/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:03:47 +0000 Michael Sebastian http://www.michaelsebastian.com/blog/?p=702 We spent last week in that sprawling, wind-blown megalopolis known as the Metroplex, aka Dallas/Fort Worth, visiting relatives during spring break. Because my kids were not already bored and cranky enough, we dragged them to Fort Worth for the day to see the Stockyards. Although they were entertained watching authentically-kitted cowpokes coax into desultory asphalt march a phlegmatic mini-herd of elderly longhorn cattle, this bribe proved to be insufficient compensation for our trip to the Amon Carter Museum afterward. Count it as a smashing success for the adults, at least.

Make time for a visit to the Carter if you ever find yourself in the area; it is worth the jaunt south and west from the airport. The museum houses a fine collection of photography, including the original Richard Avedon In The American West prints, among many others. Of the three current exhibitions there, my favorite was “Challenging Vision“, the work of Barbara Crane. I must sheepishly admit I had never heard of her before seeing this exhibit; the breadth and depth of her work defy easy description. She’s been making images for decades, and seems to straddle the fine art and commercial divide (such as it is) with an astoundingly diverse and beautiful body of work.

Best of all, all of this kull-cha comes with free admission. And the kids did like the gift shop; after all, their acculturation has to start somewhere.

Better have it locked in well—I’m pretty sure the lens and shutter will outweigh the camera.

The most striking first impression I had of the camera was its tiny size. It arrived—along with lensboards, Sinar lensboard adapter, and folding groundglass viewing hood—in a box about the size of two shoeboxes side by side. In my mind’s eye I’d expected it would be a much larger, heavier box.

Opening the box, I was amazed at just how compact the camera is. Folded, it’s about three or four inches thick, and not much larger than the 4×5″ image it produces. Upon lifting it from its styrofoam cradle, I was amazed at its featherweight lightness—so much so that I thought something must be missing. Its baseplate is made of carbon fiber composite, making it very light and rigid; the front and rear frame elements are made of a beatiful dark walnut and carbon fiber composite material. I mean, this camera is LIGHT. My Contax 645 with lens and grip outweigh it; the RZ67 I recently borrowed from a friend dwarfs it.

The controls are simple and for the most part well laid out; I’m still getting up to speed with them as I learn the camera so I’m a bit awkward yet. Given that it’s a compact field camera designed for portability, it lacks some of the movements that a technical monorail camera would offer—but that’s not an issue for me.

So my preliminary review is Four Flashbulbs—a winner. Now, if I could only afford an Imacon to do the negatives justice….(Maybe there’s a high-end-scanner bailout program or stimulus package I could tap into.)

My wife will kill me.