Further expired Ektachrome photos

July 16, 2020 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

A few further shots from the roll of expired Ektachrome I posted about yesterday.

This first shot has had the most tweaking of the ones presented here today and it still has more residual purple tones than the others. I had to take care to not reduce the colour of the foxgloves while removing the tint.

The next shot is of the Wilkin Hill Outdoor Centre, or rather the former outdoor centre as it appears to have been abandoned for quite some time. It does appear to have a new roof though, so perhaps it’s under development.

The final two images are of Agden Dike, one of the main water sources that feeds Agden reservoir. The expired Ektachrome has performed remarkably well on the first shot, giving a broad range of tones with only a few issues on the brightest sunlit silver birch trunks in the background.

The last photograph here is probably my favourite from this roll. I’m unsure if someone has placed this branch and fern into the river (it looks wedged in by rocks) or if it’s actually a small tree-stump that a fern has colonised. Whatever the case, it looks like a miniature palm tree. I’m pretty happy that I was able to focus accurately with a narrow aperture and up-close with the Zeiss’ uncoupled rangefinder focus. It isn’t a problem on more distant subjects and with the wider apertures I normally choose with this camera, but manually transferring the focus from the rangefinder to the lens in a shot like this takes care, and I’m glad to have gotten it pretty much on the nail.

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Ektachrome E200S (expired 2003).

Taken on 22 June 2020

35mm · Film photography · Photography

More Ektachrome re-scans and a street portraiture outing

July 11, 2020 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

I decided today to start a long-considered project to make portraits of strangers. It’s not an original idea – many others have done it before – but the aim is to make one-hundred portraits of people I don’t know. This is not something that comes naturally to me, both from a technical photographic angle – portraiture is not something I’ve done very much of – and also from a social aspect. By nature, I’m something of a shy, somewht introverted person, and approaching someone I don’t know to ask them if I can make their portrait is a definite challenge. So it was with no little trepidation that I decided to make a start today.

I decided that I will shoot all the portraits with my Yashica Mat 124G and use Kodak Portra 400. The choice of camera is for a number of reasons:

It makes nice photographs
I like the square format for portraits
I’ll hopefully get better quality images from a medium format camera
Because it’s a TLR, I hope that it will be disarming / start conversations in a way that an SLR maybe wouldn’t

The Portra was chosed because:

It looks great
It has a excellent exposure latitude which gives me flexibility when shooting in changeable light.

The first person I asked today said no, which wasn’t the best for my already shaky confidence, but I perservered, and the next two people both agreed to let me make their portraits. In all, out of fourteen people I asked, just three declined to take part, and there was no animosity whatsoever from anyone.

I photographed a range of people, both men and women, young and old. A couple of my subjects had cameras, so I approached them thinking that they might be more embracing of the idea of my taking their photo. A couple were street musicians, so they’re probably used to being photographed. Everyone else was a person who looked approachable, including a girl manning an ice-cream van, a couple of men who looked like they might be waiting for their wives to come out of shops, and a girl carrying a large potted plant. The latter girl asked what I would do with the photos, so I gave her the name of my blog. If you’re reading this, thank you agian for letting me make a portrait. 🙂

On the whole I was very pleased with how the day turned out and it gives me confidence to do the same again. I’ll get the film sent off for processing next week and will hopefully have some results in a few days time. Fingers crossed that they turn out ok!

For today however, I’ll post a few more of the re-scanned Ektachrome slides that I shot at a steam rally last year. The film really seems to lift in good light.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Re-scanning some Ektachrome

July 10, 2020 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

Last year I treated myself to a roll of Kodak’s re-issued Ektachrome film. I shot the whole roll at a steam rally (none of those this year, sadly 😦 ) and was looking forward to the results. Unfortunately, they weren’t what I expected – or, at least, my scans weren’t.

The slides themselves looked pretty nice. One or two of them were a little off on the exposure and looked a a bit dark, but nothing extreme, and the colours looked great. When I scanned them though, the colours were off and the levels were out considerably. Lots of deep contrast and strange, oily tones to the more vivid colours. Shadow areas lacked detail and I had to adjust the Tint and Temperature controls to make them look halfway decent. Some of them were beyond even this rectification though (or at least my skills to correct it).

The scans were made on my Plustek 8100 and Silverfast, a scanner and software that serves me perfectly well for most of the other things I scan – although this is primarily black and white. I did the best I could with them and posted some to Flickr, and a few on this blog (here, here, here & here), but otherwise wrote them off as a bit of a disappointment.

Recently however, I’ve had a hankering to shoot some more slide film, and shot a roll of 17-years expired Ektachrome the other week which gave surprisingly nice results. Not perfect, but more than I could have hoped for given the age of the film and my scanning it using Epsonscan – a package that I’ve always struggled to get satisfactory colours with (again, probably due to my skills with it as much as anything else).

So, I decided to revisit my 35mm Ektachrome slides for a fresh attempt. This time I tried something different.

Back before I bought my Plustek, I’d tried some alternative scanning applications to see if I could improve my colour scans on my Epson V550. One of those was Silverfast, the other was Vuescan. Silverfast software is linked to your scanner, so the copy I have for my Plustek won’t work on my Epson (something I dislike – If I buy a piece of software, I’d like it to work with different pieces of hardware thank you. It came with the Plustek though, so I’ll not complain too much). Vuescan however, will work with anything you own and has free lifetime updates if you buy the Pro version. As I still had the demo version, I decided to try it with my Plustek and the Ektachrome transparencies.

Lo and behold, the results looked much more promising than the scans I’d managed with Silverfast. I was pretty happy about this and, as Vuescan is discounted at present, decided to fork out for the full, non-watermarked version and give my Ektachromes a fresh attempt.

It took a bit of trial and error, but I think I’ve found a setup that does a good job on them. Certainly an improvement over the original scans to my eyes, so I thought I’d publish a few examples here today. I think the new scans are a noticeable improvement – a lot of the horrible green tinge has gone (how I didn’t spot that originally I don’t know) and there’s a lot more shadow detail. They’re in before and after pairs, the before shots first.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Fire engines

August 23, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

Another cropped shot, this time for artistic reasons rather than a glaring light-leak!

The vintage fire-engine in the foreground has a wooden ladder, similiar to those seen in the background, but I’ve annoyingly managed to chop some of it out when framing the shot. I think it was because, as I was composing the image people were wandering between of the fire-engines, and I wanted to get the shot before one of them walked into the frame. This probably caused me to rush a little and thus mis-compose the picture. As a result I’ve cropped it to a 6×7 ratio. The bell is a little tight in the top-right corner (and if you look really closely there is a tiny sliver of the wooden ladder still in frame), but the bell is intact and I still think it works ok.

Ektar certainly gets on well with the reds!

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Ektar.

Taken on 17 August 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Hazy days of summer

July 13, 2019July 13, 2019 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

The photo in today’s post looks a little hazy. However, rather than some sort of photography mishap, this is actually because the air was full of smoke from dozens of steam engines that were building up power.

I’m still not sure about the quality of my Ektachrome scans. Some are really nice (today’s shot isn’t bad), but some are disappointing in how they’ve turned out, either as a result of my photography, or how I’ve been able to scan and process them (Plustek 8100, Silverfast, and Lightroom). The odd thing is that some look lovely and some look really odd, with somewhat garish (but not correct) colours and overly muddy shadows.

It’ll be interesting to see how the roll of Velvia 50 looks when I get around to shooting that.

Anyone else tried the new Ektachrome yet and, if so, how have you found it?

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Coach travel

July 3, 2019 fishyfisharcade3 Comments

This was one of a number of vintage buses and trucks at the steam rally I attended at the weekend. I was framing up the shot when these two old fellas wandered into the picture and, I think, improved it.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Maintenance

July 2, 2019 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

This chap was performing some maintenance or repairs on the tyre of this engine. I’m not sure what the tyre is actually made of – I know that they can have solid rubber tyres, but this one looked to be laminated in some way and some of it peeled off in a layer as I observed. Perhaps that’s just the way rubber tyres of this sort are constructed, or perhaps it was made of some other material?

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Steam rally 2019

July 1, 2019July 1, 2019 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

After a hiatus (on my part) last year, I visited the Sheffield Steam Rally again this weekend. The weather was warm and sunny – in fact very warm on the Saturday, hence my choice of visiting on Sunday instead. I like nice weather, but not too much ot it all at once. 🙂

I decided to shoot the roll of Ektachrome that I bought myself just after Christmas and which I’ve been saving for a suitable occasion. The steam rally, I decided, would be suitable enough, otherwise I’d risk the film never being matched with a good enough subject and sitting in the fridge forever.

I was quite excited to shoot with it, and it was only the third roll of positive film that I’ve bought, so I loaded it into my Nikon F80 (figuring that that would have the most reliable metering of my film cameras) and set off – with a roll of HP5+ as trusty back-up.

As soon as I entered the showgrounds, I started taking pictures, but it was only when I got to about frame ten that a sudden horrible thought dawned on me… I wasn’t focusing the camera!

You see, most of my photography over the past couple of months or so has been with compact cameras (where a half-press of the shutter triggers the auto-focus), or manual focus SLRs, where it’s very obvious when something is out of focus. However, I’d made a rookie mistake of forgetting that I’d set my F80 for back-button focusing, and was instead just half-pressing the shutter to focus and then taking the shot. The reason I didn’t notice my error more quickly is that I was shooting at f/8 and the viewfinder looked to be pretty much in focus anyway – I just wasn’t checking for it snapping to sharpness when pressing the button.

As soon as I realised my mistake, I resorted to doing things properly, but I had sour thoughts about the almost-third-of-a-roll of expensive Ektachrome that I’d probably wasted. I did think about re-taking some of my initial shots, but then decided I’d take the risk that they might be ok and photograph other things instead.

I got my slides back today and, thankfully, all bar a couple of those first shots have come out focused sharply enough to be used, so I was relieved about that. I haven’t scanned the full roll (or even started on my HP5+ shots) yet, but here is one of the pictures that I have. The Ektachrome has produced beautifully saturated colours in the sunshine ( the colours on some of the more shady frames need tweaking though – especially the reds) and, in fact, I’ve actually reduced the saturation a little on this photo.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019