Okay, so I walked the Grist Mill Trail from its head to swinging bridge, then walked up to the "impressive" part of cascade falls.
Before I set out on that, I picked up some Ilford Delta 100 and 400 film and a 52mm red filter. Armed with both my *ist DL and MX around my neck (which must have made me look like the most phenomenal nerd ever), I set out with a misloaded roll of color film and the 43 on the MX, and the 50-200 on the DL. Nothing exciting from the digital, but I wanted to try to set up a "black and white" shot with the red filter on a digital camera. That's what you see above. Seeing as how I'm using a quarter of the photosites on the sensor, it should come as no surprise that detail takes a pretty good hit using this method. I already knew that would happen, but it came as a surprise that the meter can no longer be trusted - the camera doesn't know the difference between film and the digital sensor, so it meters down three stops even though the red channel stays just as sensitive to the light coming in. Blah blah blah translation - trusting the meter results in an overexposed shot in the amount of the color filter's exposure factor: in this case, about 2 stops, give or take.
Figuring out a conversion workflow (because I KNEW I needed to shoot raw to do this) was an interesting challenge. I figured out that if you go to the "calibration" tab in Adobe Camera Raw and desaturate the reds and greens completely, getting a monochrome image is just adjusting the blue saturation down to the point where all three histograms line up perfectly. Then you go back to the first tab, bump up exposure between 2.5 and 3.5 stops, and fiddle with shadows until you get the overall contrast you're looking for.
At any rate, I'm taking the film in to have it sent off tomorrow; hopefully, sometime this week, I get the results of that back.
Nat,
ReplyDeleteNeat. I didn't realize it was still that cold up there.
- Josh
Nat,
ReplyDeleteWhat possessed you to put a red filter on your dSLR? I find that at least a little odd, although the effect is kinda neat. I'd love to see a color image, even though it probably doesn't show any major colors if the falls were frozen.
I finally got my new 100-300/5.6L from Keh.com. This one has an operating AF motor, and seems to be in better condition than the other one. The push-pull zoom is much less loose on this one, and it can hold 300mm up to about a 40-45 degree angle with no assistance. I always find it odd that the push-pull lenses can hold position when pointed down, but not when pointed up. The only real beef I have is that the lens cap they sent is WAY too loose, and I've already had to order a replacement. Oh, and I didn't get my neat lens case this time. Didn't need it anyway.
- Josh
I think it was somewhere around the 24-26 degree mark up there today. Most of the start of that trail was coated in ice; I didn't walk up the road on the south side because I don't think it has seen the sun in months - still covered in snow.
ReplyDeleteI'd give you a color version, but apparently, I was too busy with the MX to get one.
I wanted to try the red filter on digital for two reasons, really - one was to "check exposure" in a manner of speaking, just to take some shots with it on and make sure the meter indications were in line between my digital body and the MX, which is ... well, I don't know how old the batteries in the meter are right now, nor how good they were when I got started. Second, I wanted to see if it would be possible to do a meaningful black and white conversion. Most of the time, when I try to take what I feel would be a decent black and white shot, the conversion process just seems really flat. Desaturating just never seemed right, so I thought I'd try overloading on one color (since I wanted the red filter for the film) and desaturating from that. I think it worked out better, but then again, I didn't take any comparison shots to get a direct feel for that.
Also, the image looks like crap at 100% on screen before resizing. Probably looks pretty awful after resizing, too.
Good news on the telezoom - hope it works well for birds for you!
Nat,
ReplyDeleteSave yourself the trouble. Shoot color, then adjust the colors, THEN switch to grayscale mode. I was tinkering around with this today, simulating the look of several B&W films.
- Josh
Playing with a couple of JPEGs from earlier trips to the valley, I can't get the contrast I want out of it.
ReplyDeleteCorrection - I tried again, got it to work... wow that was boring. I'm glad there's still film for this sort of thing.
Film and red filters.
Nat,
ReplyDeleteYou know what is odd. I've been playing with the 100-300/5.6L indoors to check the AF system.
It is constantly berated for being slow and noisy. Noisy it is.
What's odd, the motor is actually really fast, and when it can focus, it focuses just as fast as my other lenses. It does hunt a little on some surfaces, but that may be the camera. The weird thing is that there seems to be a delay sometimes. Like, it doesn't always start focusing as fast as my other lenses. Maybe a bandwidth issue? I know they've upgraded the interface speed over the years for some lenses, I wonder if this is why...
I can't really judge anything by using a f/5.6 lens indoors. f/5.6 is the maximum AF rating on my camera so...
- Josh
I'm thinking most autofocus lenses and the complaints they pick up about difficulty locking are related to camera bodies being "at the limit" of their AF modules. People tend to complain a lot about the 5.6 pentax zooms seriously hunting, even on the K10D... the fact that the lens does it on every camera they try and not every lens they use on their camera hunts, then... yeah.
ReplyDeleteI notice that even with the better manual focus feel, the 43 and 77 focus more than acceptably fast.