I like film...(open thread)

[SunnySixteen]

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Trying to beat the heat with a cool image! This was the last shot on the roll so it's a bit dirty.

Fernie, BC Canada, March 2017

Tri-X/M6/50 Summicron

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[Guest JMF]

In Mongolia, 1993

 

Velvia BW conversion Pentax K 1000

 

on the road by JM__, on Flickr

Edited September 3, 2017 by JMF

[AntonioF]

Trying to beat the heat with a cool image! This was the last shot on the roll so it's a bit dirty.

Fernie, BC Canada, March 2017

Tri-X/M6/50 Summicron

 

Pretty cool!

I'm always jealous when I see snow as we get basically none in southern Italy ...

[honcho]

In Mongolia, 1993

 

Velvia BW conversion Pentax K 1000

 

on the road by JM__, on Flickr

Very nice, Jean-Marc. Amazing destination, too!

[johnwolf]

Please let me have your reaction to these pictures, but don’t click “Thanks” if you only like the back story — I’d like to know the reactions to the pictures themselves.

 

Hi Mitch. These are extremely evocative images for me. The setting, the dark skinny figures, the motion in the second, and your processing make them very powerful.

 

I must say, though, whenever I see post work like this in pictures that cross into the domain of reportage, I wonder how accurate they are. We all know that no photograph depicts reality, but I can't help but wonder how much of such portrayals is fact and how much effect. Of course, reportage may not be your aim at all. Also in the back of my mind is also the question of amplifying misfortune through photographic technique. 

 

I appreciate that we each have our personal post-processing threshold, beyond which we become uneasy. I'm not suggesting you have crossed mine, but this is what I think about when viewing photographs like this. As you know, i'm a pretty straight shooter. 

 

John  

[christoph_d]

These 1965 pictures are in Turkanaland in north-west Kenya, probably near Lodwar, at that time a very small town. I was driving alone, back from Lake Turkana, in a VW Beetle, not on roads, but on tracks in the scrub desert, until I reached the Uganda trunk road from Nairobi to Kampala. The distance from Lake Turkana to Kampala is shown on the web as 670 km and 13 hours. As I recall, it took me 12 hours and I got back home at midnight, driving as fast on the highway as the Beetle would go and crashing into a dog that raced across the unlit road a half an hour before reaching Kampala.

 

The Turkana, a Nilotic people with language and culture that have similarities to the Maasai and Samburu in Kenya and the Karamojong in Uganda were, and still are, nomadic pastoralists, with cattle at the core of their culture. They remain one of the poorest ethnic groups in Kenya. I recall a friend, Ford Foundation representative for East Africa, who I was meeting at Lake Turkana telling me that the lake was teeming with fish, and that the Turkana, often near starvation, could vastly improve their lives if they fished and ate fish. 

 

In a web search, I just found the the Norwegian aid agency invested US$22 million in the late-1970s in a huge fish-freezing plant aimed at the Turkana exploiting the lake’s fish stocks; it failed soon after startup. The Turkana, like other semi-nomadic pastoralists live off the milk, blood and meat of their herds. Also, the cost of electricity to operate the giant freezers and the demand for clean water in the desert environment were too high.

 

As for the pictures themselves, these are low contrast negatives shot on Adox KB17 (Leica IIIc and Summarit 50) and have a muddy tonal palette that I was never able to print well in the darkroom. I digitalized them recently and got the same muddy tonal palette, which I processed in a variety of ways: some of the versions I made dark, in one effort bringing out a brooding black cloud; but that took away from the desolation of the huts and people. Finally, I went for the high-key look here, which best reflects what I saw. However, I didn’t post these pictures until I saw a similar tonality in a photograph in David Vestal’s The Craft Photography, showing tractors in what looks like Iowa farmland (page 328). I found I could download this book free from archive.com.

 

Please let me have your reaction to these pictures, but don’t click “Thanks” if you only like the back story — I’d like to know the reactions to the pictures themselves.

Mitch,

 

Thank you for the interesting story, and also for the images. To me they look extremely contrasty and harsh. To me this is a style that in the past in journalism has typically been used to depict drastic, even catastrophic situations. So if this is what you want to show you fully succeeded.

Have you tried to print your negatives the traditional way?

 

Best regards

 

Christoph

[Guest Nowhereman]

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Adam/Michael/Jean-Marc/John/Chtistoh - Thanks for commenting on the Turkana pictures. I must have made a dozen versions, going the full range from dark to light tonality and various degrees of contrast and "clarity" or "structure". After all these years, although I remember hurriedly pressing the shutter for these two shots, before the people would move into another configuration because I had stopped my car on the track and gone out to take the picture, I don't remember how the light was. It's clear, however, that I underexposed by at least 1½ stops. 

 

As I said, I have never been able to print these negatives in the darkroom. Adox KB17 (ISO 40) film, one the first thin layer films produced, was reputed to have good resolution; but, as I see it, these negatives have neither the latitude nor acutance of Tri-X, which now I wish I had shot. In this overall context, I found these two to be the best version, by letting the bodies go black, without detail.

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Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

[chrism]

F6, 28/1.4, XP2, HC-110, X1 scan:

Wallace by chrism229, on Flickr

 

C.

[RoiDuNord]

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Roosevelt's Cottage Kitchen on Campobello Island, NB.

 

Leica MA, 35mm Lux, HP5....

[A miller]

"Fiery" reflections of the illuminated mountains against the oily Dead Sea waters...

Velvia 50

Hassy 503cw 80mm Planar

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[B.Toews]

I have been without internet access for the last couple of weeks and am just getting a chance to catch up on this thread now.  Lots of excellent work as always!  I still have a backlog of 25+ rolls to develop, and am starting to get through some of those.  I just finally started developing photos from my spring trip through the Rockies, and will start posting those shortly.  Until then, here's a landscape taken on a hiking trip last week.

 

M7, Zeiss 50/2 Planar, HP5 @ 800, DD-X:

 

Untitled by Brendan | Toews, on Flickr

[Reeray]

Unusual Rock Formation

 

Rolleiflex 3.5f TLR Ilford Delta 100 Minolta MultiPro scan

 

Edited September 4, 2017 by Reeray

[Guest Nowhereman]

On the Turkana shots in post #39618, on another forum someone with the screen name of "watereden" made the following comment bringing a part of the Turkana story up to date:

 

Last year I was in the Omo valley in Southern Ethiopia photographing the very diverse tribes down there - there is multi-ethnicity still but this will be subsumed into a greater Ethiopian identity within a few years because of habitat changing infrastructural works, most notably the damming of the Omo river, which feeds Lake Turkana. Sad but necessary, I'm afraid, because the benefits of electricity supply to 50 million people outweighs the inevitable destruction of the lifestyle of [a tribe of half a million]; however, their youngsters will gain opportunities never before available to them. Of course, the National Geographic disagrees but there you are.

 

That said, two observations. Firstly, these people in the main are now much healthier and better fed than appears from these photos. Implication is something good is happening although it may just reflect current climactic conditions. Secondly, from a photographer's point of view, the light is very, very harsh, which makes it very hard. Nothing changes here.

 

I've bold-faced the last sentence to highlight how really harsh the light was — more so than I could remember — further explaining the difficulty of working with that negative.

 

Below is another picture from 1965. My wife an I were driving the VW beetle pictured in post #39601, in the Karamoja district of Uganda, towards Moroto. Half an hour earlier, going round a bend, we saw a group of Karamojong men on a small hill next to the road. When they saw me they threw down their long spears and ran off — Karamojong were forbidden to carry spears and they probably thought I was a District Officer. We then came upon this small group of Karamojong women resting in the shade. We stopped but could not communicate with them, as they did not speak "up-country Kiswahili", which was the lingua franca of Uganda. The Karamojong are an ethnic group related to the Turkana. But these women, and the men we saw earlier, living in a kinder climate, were in better physical shape than the Turkana pictured earlier above.

 

The camera was the same Leica IIIc with the Summitar 50 lens and the film was Kodachrome II. It must have been about 2pm and the light was very bright, so that the slide had some blown highlights. This image was digitalized with the M9, and would have benefited from the greater dynamic range of the M10. Another problem is that this roll was in a container with out belonging that spent, through mishaps, six months at the port of Mombasa, including a season of the "long rains". When I scanned it, it had turned into what looks like a monochrome of cyan — yes, Kodachrome can also go bad in extreme conditions — and for the post-processing to get the look of the dry-season grass necessitated an enormous addition of yellow in the white balance. I had no color reference for this, and it was more difficult than to color correct a color negative film.

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[stray cat]

^ both look great and stand good in their own right, but, seeing them side by side, I edge towards the colour as there's some lovely subtle tones in there that the monotone misses.

 

 

I would go for b&w definitely. Great job stray cat!

 

 

Phil,

 

All are nice, but my preference is b&w.

Oh, and can you pass by and show it in print please, I am sure it gains a lot on a nice piece of Baryt...

 

Rgds

 

C.

 

 

Phil , more "savage" impression in watching color with wet fern plants and moss on stone

not visible in b&w. Only color give this impression.

For me color first and secondly b&w nice for water

Henry

 

Thank you so much Reeray, TMX, Christoph and Henry. That's two-all. Kind of how I feel about them too - I like both for different reasons, and sometimes one more than the other then vice-versa. And Christoph, I'd love to just swing by and show you a Baryta print - hopefully we'll get to Europe again someday soon(ish).


 

[stray cat]

For the beauty of water , black and white gives a nice rendering here

Regards

Henry

Thanks a lot Doc. Yes, I really like that smooth flowing water effect, even though it's often regarded as cliché in some circles. But when it's quite dark down there in the gully, there's not much you can do (unless you use digital 12,000 ISO or something - but then we know it loses something else, that feeling of fluidity and softness).


[stray cat]

 Thanks so much !

 

 

Brilliant shot , wow !




You are more than welcome, and thank you so much Jean-Marc!


[stray cat]

Just excellent.  I'm a huge fan of FP4+ as well.  What do you develop it with? 

 

 

Thanks a lot Dan. I use XTOL 1:1 for just about everything now, and usually just follow the recommendations of the Massive Developer Chart. Seems to work well enough for me.


 

[stray cat]

Phil - This is truly outstanding.  So many facets at play; the motion of the waterfall, the rolling stream and the wealth of tonality.  Really stellar!!

 

Phil - These are also amazing.  Each has its own strong points, but my preference is the B&W b/c of the way you have captured a wide tonal range in the leaves.  Having said this, I could totally see how one could go either way; or be squarely (and painfully) on the fence!

 

Thank you so much Adam! Landscape's an interesting genre, isn't it? You obviously have to "be there" but in such a very real way you are very much at the mercy of nature. As your determined recent efforts with the Dead Sea and your on-going work in New York show, however, you can intelligently use your faculties of awareness to perhaps swing things your own way somewhat, and your results speak for themselves. In my case, I was only there by chance - sometimes, happily, things work out regardless.





 

After being awake for about 3 hours at that point, and driving an hour and a half along windy pitch black roads hugging steep mountain cliffs, it all came to a head seeing the glorious sun and brilliant reflections illuminating against the oily waters and salt formations.

The Dead Sea.

Velvia 50

503cw, 80mm Planar

Velvia 50 sunrise.jpg

This is just brilliant! As soon as I saw it I was reminded of the name of an Australian surf movie from the 1970s - "Morning of the Earth". To me, that name fits this picture perfectly.


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Hallo,

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[stray cat]

I would say the B&W if it were not for the plant in front of, and extending into, to fall. In the color shot it seems almost to be growing out of the frame.

 

Best,

 

Wayne

 

Thank you Wayne. There is a different apparent dimensionality to the colour version, now that you mention it - some of the reds in the timber and foliage come forward whereby they remain very much similar to the tonality of the greens in the monochrome version. And yet... and yet... it's insoluble, really. Perhaps it's really best to just stick with either black and white OR colour rather than confusing the situation!

[stray cat]

Your "falls" photographs are really special Phil, it looks like a lovely and inspiring location and your photo's (in both colour and black and white) certainly do it justice. I agree about FP4+ and love the tonality.

 

Regards

Charles

 

Thanks so much Charles. I really, really like FP4+ - in medium format especially. Come to think of it, I have a few rolls in the fridge right now...


 

My apologies, no posts from me for a while... something about Mr Windows closing the Gates on my scanner, something about a missing dll, (What ever that is.) I'm afraid it take a while before I pluck up the courage to do something about it, computers and I are not good friends, but rest assured my dark room and I are, so without further ado a print fresh out of the fixer ready for washing...

Sorry.jpg




This looks such a wonderful portrait. It would make a sensational larger print if you should happen to find yourself in the darkroom again...
 One of the truly great things about film photography is that the technology requirements can be very low, yet superb work such as this can be produced. Even though it seems to be a self-evident truth, we should never forget that - computers are NOT needed for photography!