Old-time pleasure

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of shooting a couple rolls of XP2 in a beautiful OM-1 and a Kodak Retina 1A.To make matters even more simple, I used, for the very first time, a Zuiko 50/1.8. I used to own a 50/1.4 and currently have a 50/3.5, but I never used a 50/1.8 before. Yes, it's an oldie--silvernosed, low serial-number.

The sky was dynamic and I was shooting in a small town which time has passed by. On the Olympus, I did use a polarizer combined with a Red #25 to give the scenes a signature look. The Retina was a riot to shoot with. Exposures were easy to come up with--Sunny 16 -1 stop.

I'll be developing the film today and will be scanning a few shots over the next couple of days.What is interesting is how different I shoot when it's film vs digital. I hate to admit this, but I think I'm a far better photographer with film than digital.

Rescue the Boring

Recently I spent an evening photographing the Wittenberg Grange Hall north of Newton, Iowa. The above photograph was taken with the Olympus E-1 and processed straight with no modification in RawShooter. (click on image to see a larger version).

Unfortunately, the image doesn't do anything for me. The dynamic range was very extreme and attempts to compress it would probably result in a muddy image. I was playing around with the highlight contrast and fill light adjustment when I saw something unique happening. Ah, time to have a little fun.


One thing that suprised me was the extensive amount of detail hidden in the shadows. The detail in the weatherboarding is there and even the bricks are visible. To achieve this image, I moved the Fill Light to +100, Highlight Contrast to -100, Saturation to +80, Exposure Compensation to +.70, Shadow Contrast to +30, and some minor adjustments to the white-balance and tint.

This isn't a perfect image, but it does illustrate what you can do with an editor to breathe new life into an image destined to be deleted.

Sunrise along the Lake Superior shoreline

Porcupine Mountains State Park provides some amazingly diversified shorelines. The above photo (click on it to see a larger version) was taken about a kilometer west of Union Campground just prior to sunrise. The glowing sky eluminated the storm debris which was washed up all the way to the forest.

The photo was taken with the rising sun to my back. Camera setup was the Olympus OM-4, Zuiko 35/shift lens and tripod. I scanned the Kodak T400CN chromogenic film with the Nikon Coolscan V-ED with Vuescan version 8.4.29.

Where silver meets pixels

This photograph was taken along the Lake Superior shoreline at Porcupine State Park in Michigan. I used an OM-4 with the Zuiko 24/2.8

Film used for this picture is Kodak T400CN which is a chromogenic film. This film has been very difficult to use in the darkroom, but it scans exceptionally well. I scanned this with the latest version of Vuescan (8.4.29) on the Nikon Coolscan V-ED. The only editing was a slight amount of contrast enhancement, resizing and sharpening. (click on the image to see a larger version).

Exposure was determined using Multi-Spot Metering in Manual mode. I spot metered several spots in the sky as well as shadow locations. To preserve DOF, I first set my aperture to provide desired image sharpness and adjusted shutter-speed last. In the OM-4 viewfinder, there are marks in the exposure scale indicating +2 and -2 stops. I adjusted the shutter-speed to keep all the dots within these marks. If the exposure dots extend beyond the 4-stop range, it is necessary to determine which is more important to preserve--shadows or highlights. As highlights were most important in this case, with the sky and the birch bark, I would have made sure the dots didn't extend beyond the +2 mark.

T400CN does have an extensive toe and shoulder, which really gives us about 11-stops of usable dynamic range, so it isn't overly necessary to worry about over or under-exposing the film. But the scanning process is dynamic-range limited.

Regardess, the digitization process of film gives us a greater usable dynamic range, with a real toe and shoulder than a digital camera.

Vista and NVidia Dual Monitor Issues

We just got a brand new Toshiba laptop with the NVidia GeForce Go 7300 video card. The problem is that there is a major driver incompatibility between Microsoft Vista and this card. The system does not appear to support dual-monitors. This is a major problem since this computer is for use in displaying SongShow Plus.

When plugging in the external monitor or projector, the laptop would immediately output the screen to the external monitor and disable the laptop screen. No setting changes would bring it back and obviously screen spanning was not possible.

In the sytem's "Task Scheduler" there is a process called "TMM" located under the MobilePC category. This needs to be disabled. Once disabled the system will refrain from forcing a switch to the external monitor.

With TMM disabled, all of the multi-monitor features now function, albiet rather questionably. Vista is not an operating system quite ready for prime-time. I'm looking forward to updates to both Vista and the NVidia card.