NikonGear'23
Images => Nature, Flora, Fauna & Landscapes => Topic started by: David Paterson on October 01, 2017, 23:16:29
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My recent trip to n.w. Scotland, from which I posted quite a number of images, has re-awakened my interest in that region, and I've been looking through my film archive and finding worthwhile images which have never seen the light of day, just exposed, developed and filed.
Here is one - looking north across the mountains of Assynt and Coigach from a summit in the Ben More Coigach range. Early 1990s, Pentax 67, on a hazy late-summer day.
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David, thank you for retrieving paradise.
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I would love to see this as a large print. Stunning.
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Thanks, Jakov and Anthony, for you kind comments.
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I guess it would look better if you print it in an analogue process & then scan the print. I feel the current digital representation does not do the picture justice. I have seen your books and I know there is much more in your film strip than what we can see in your post.
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This contrast between the dynamism of the landscape and the delicate lighting is impressive here. I love the pink reflection on the right edge of the lake in the front center. Yes, a panorama print should look nice.
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I have yet to visit the NW Highlands, but have been thinking about them for years - pity they are so distant from me.
They have a different feel to other parts of the Highlands, with these isolated, old-looking, steep rock islands in a sea of bogs.
From all I have seen it feels like a very wild, primeval place. Not very friendly to the long distance walker, but very evocative.
Maybe I should invest in a good drone... ;)
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Thanks for your comments, Akira, Frank and Simone.
I guess it would look better if you print it in an analogue process & then scan the print. I feel the current digital representation does not do the picture justice. I have seen your books and I know there is much more in your film strip than what we can see in your post.
Frank - yes, you are right, in a way, but this is a very difficult piece of film to deal with - under-exposed, dark, very low contrast, almost no colour except grey, and shot on a very hazy day. I am trying a different approach to the problem and if it is better, I'll post the result.
Simone - this is a unique part of the Highlands, and the mountains make me think of giant prehistoric creatures rising out of the primeval swamp. There are plenty of wetland areas around the base of the mountains, but lots of good walking as well.
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David, thank you for retrieving paradise.
Very well put!
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What a nice landscape image !
I love the composition and this feeling of depth (I means the distance visible from the foreground to infinity)
I don't really know where the sun is, but the lighting is, in my opinion, the main factor of this successful shot.
Paradise, yes, this the right word... ;) :D
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Beautiful scene. Perhaps it could receive a higher resolution scan sometime in the future?
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Thank you, Francis and Keith.
Beautiful scene. Perhaps it could receive a higher resolution scan sometime in the future?
I've just tried that, without much success, tho' I may try again. But what seems to be happening is that the scanner is trying to pull as much detail as it can, out through the murky, hazy air and the result looks very odd. I'll take another look tomorrow.
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My recent trip to n.w. Scotland, from which I posted quite a number of images, has re-awakened my interest in that region, and I've been looking through my film archive and finding worthwhile images which have never seen the light of day, just exposed, developed and filed.
Here is one - looking north across the mountains of Assynt and Coigach from a summit in the Ben More Coigach range. Early 1990s, Pentax 67, on a hazy late-summer day.
Beautiful image David!
The Pentax 67 was quite a camera and made beautiful images. You probably smile when someone calls a DSLR a “big heavy camera”.
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My memory of the Pentax 6x7 was it was big but not really heavy. I didn't cheat and look up the specs. I could be wrong.
The cameras I remember as heavy were the Nikon F2As with MD-2 and MB-1, that was a boat anchor and the Linhof Technika 45 IV which I still own is a war hammer. The Nikon F2As with MD-3 and MB-1 was more sensible and less fiddly in operation. Why I bought the MD-2 I'll never know.
Dave
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Thank you, Bill and David - the Pentax 6x7, 67 and 67II were my workhorse medium-format cameras for nearly 30 years until I "went digital" in 2006. The later versions were excellent and the lenses were superb.
David - I did look up the data and was surprised to find that the 67 and 67II were only 200gm heavier than the D800 (1210gm as against 1008). However, since the lenses were heavier also, it seems likely that a typical kit for a day's shooting - one body and 4 lenses - would be around a kilogram heavier than the equivalent Nikon gear. That amount of extra weight is something you would feel, at the end of a day on your feet. (The total load would include film, of course - 20 to 30 rolls for a typical day.)
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(The total load would include film, of course - 20 to 30 rolls for a typical day.)
20 or 30 rolls of MF film per day?!
How many frames in a roll?
I thought that shooting with MF was a more deliberate, slow process.
It must have been very expensive also in terms of running costs; I imagine one would have the film processed in a professional facility, not a consumer one.
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The old 6x7 was 1.3 Kg and one of the best lenses; smc 67 400mm f/4 ED IF was 3.7 Kg and a big tripod was mandatory,,,
Images was stunning, indeed price was high 12 10 images per roll,,, Came home from a trip to the Alps with about 60 images,,,
Sorry for posting images in your thread Dave :) I hope its OK,,,
Zugspitze:
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5805/23545803555_6c5de274b8_h.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/BSEp5g)Garmish_0008 (https://flic.kr/p/BSEp5g) by Erik Gunst Lund (https://www.flickr.com/photos/erik_lund/), on Flickr
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5700/23546165895_22b57d848c_h.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/BSGfMv)Garmish_0006 (https://flic.kr/p/BSGfMv) by Erik Gunst Lund (https://www.flickr.com/photos/erik_lund/), on Flickr
The scan is saved on Flicker at 3000 pixel I believe the original scans are about 7000 pixel or more,,, Coolscan LS-8000 - each scan took about 45 minutes,,,
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Funny I still don't remember the Pentax 6x7 as being that heavy. Here is a cut and paste from a Pentax 67II brochure...
185.5mm (W) x 151.0mm (H) x 106.0mm (D)
(7.3" x 5.9" x 4.2") and 1,660g (58.6 oz.) with
AE pentaprism finder 67II and without
batteries.
I owned two bodies with a standard non-meter prism and a waist level finder. The weight above is for the AE prism. I think I owned a 55mm, 90 w/sync, 135 macro and a 200mm. I liked that I could shoot Kodacolor 400 in the early evening using found support and the grain wasn't too offensive.
Dave
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I'd like to thank Dave and Erik for posting their images.
Takes me back to the 1980's when I used Pentax SLR's and also owned a 6x7 for a few years. I admit the main barrier was having the time to use it properly (I was still learning my craft with the 35mm kit).
I was going to boast about having taken mine, plus tripod up Mount Snowden, but Erik beat me to it with a bigger climb (and much heavier lens that I had). In the end, I was torn between taking the time to get the composition right (and using a hand-held light meter) and my wife getting bored of waiting and walking off :(
One comment/question for Dave:
Your image has lovely content, but appears less detailed than Erik's. That might just be the contrast & subject matter, but maybe yours was scanned at a lower resolution?
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Erik, the first one is stunning! The gradation is very rich, which was one of the major advantages of MF (or LF for that matter) over 135 format, if I remember correctly.
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Thanks Akira! Appriciate it.
The rendering was so nice!
Zugspitze
(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/654/23545809805_02933f2bf0_h.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/BSEqW2)Garmish_0011 (https://flic.kr/p/BSEqW2) by Erik Gunst Lund (https://www.flickr.com/photos/erik_lund/), on Flickr
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Oh, yes, the gradient of the mountains corresponding to their distances is beautifully rendered on both the first and the latest images.
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20 or 30 rolls of MF film per day?!
How many frames in a roll?
I thought that shooting with MF was a more deliberate, slow process.
It must have been very expensive also in terms of running costs; I imagine one would have the film processed in a professional facility, not a consumer one.
I was talking about my years of professional use of the Pentax 67. I generally would have an art director or designer with me, and could not possibly run out of film if we were more than a couple of hundred metres from the car; it would have looked so unprofessional; so I always carried a safe margin. But I used the 67 exactly as though it was a 35mm.
With the 67 you got *10 frames on a 120 roll* (Erik!), or 20 on a 220 roll. By the time I switched to digital, the cost of film and processing was more than 50P per frame; ie. shoot 2 exposures and you had spent over £!.00 - it could get quite expensive.
David - I forgot about the weight of the pentaprism - that really was a heavy camera.
Erik - of course I don't mind, especially when they are stunning shots like these. I never had the monster 400, but I had the 300 f4 ED - that was a lovely lens too. Actually I had quite a good range of lenses - 30mm fisheye, 45, 55, 75, 105 f2.5 (their "fast" lens), 165, 200 and 300; but I soon slimmed down a bit, losing the 55 and 200.
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Colin and Akira, thank you both for commenting.
Colin - I think Erik's beautiful shots illustrate a common phenomenon of high mountains, when haze fills the valleys but the summits are up in clear air, but our modest little Scottish hills can't rise above such ground-haze. Also, this piece of film wasn't scanned but copied using my D800 so the quality is not quite what you would get from a good scan. When processing the copy, towards the end I actually softened a lot of semi-detail because it just didn't look right - details already made soft by the haze. This is that rare thing - an image that looks better as a print than on a monitor; I've just made a 21" print, and it looks pretty good (imho).
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Sorry for taking this thread even more off topic.
Elsa Hoffmann and I were discussing the cost of digital photography the other day.
My father's job was taking photos of school kids, which is a vocation where a lot of photos are taken in a relatively short period of time. I calculated the other day that he took probably in excess of 2.4 million photos while doing this.
In the process, he used two F3's and an FE for backup. Thus, at least one of the F3's had more than a million shutter actuations. Modern digital cameras seem not to last nearly as long. In fact, my D750 has eaten two shutter mechanisms in less than 62 000 actuations.
But the real cost probably lies in the post-processing hardware. A new high-end computer every 2-3 years is pretty expensive. And they don't seem to last much longer than that.
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At 50p per image (see David's post above) if your father shot 6x7, he would have spend ~1.2M £ over the course of his professional career, only on film and development.
Granted 135 format is much cheaper. Let's say 1/5 of the cost. Still £240K (probably more). Much more I reckon than a single professional with a small business would spend on computers and digital cameras over an equivalent time.
I think everyone agrees running a photography business has become cheaper in the digital age, if one only considers equipment and consumables.
I think (a non-professional, not so informed point of view) that professional photographers these days face different challenges.
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My friend pro photog said during the film days that the slide films and development cost around 100,000 JPY per year. He used 35mm, Pentax 6x7 as well as 4x5 cameras.
But I used the 67 exactly as though it was a 35mm.
As amateur photographer, I used 35mm film cameras (my favorite film was Kodachrome 25) as though they were 4x5 LF cameras. ;D
As I wanted to develop the film as soon as possible, I liked to use 24-exposure films.