Showing posts with label OM-4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OM-4. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

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.



Sunday, July 22, 2007

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.