Wallace Koopmans Artlog

While I primarily shoot colour film over black and white and I also prefer to see most digital pictures in colour, some landscapes seem to just look better in black and white.  Whether that is because my idea of the wilderness is  filtered through the historical language of photography.  A language where the landscapes of the West are portrayed in grandeur and black and white, or that  perhaps there is some reason we prefer the contrast that colour images lack in these circumstances.  What ever the reason, I have chosen to convert these images into different shades of grey and prefer them that way.  These were all taken using the incredible Pentax K-3 DSLR which provides more detail than I have ever been able to capture before.

The second half to my Adox Colour Implosion post the first part can be seen here Half Frame Implosion

While in Niagara Falls Ontario I had some time in the late evenings to walk around and take a few pictures.  I chose to use Cinestill film for this because of its tungsten colour balance and how it reacts to light sources with a certain glow.  I also chose to use the Canon QL17 both for its fast 40mm F1.7 lens and that it can be used completely manually.  While it does lack slow shutter speeds I wouldn’t have a tripod and these are all hand-held so the 1/4sec slowest shutter speed is leisurely enough.

Cinestill 800 is an interesting film because it is actually motion picture film, specifically Kodak Vision 3 5219 that has had its Remjet layer removed to allow for it to be processed using regular C41 and its then packaged in a 35mm still film cartridge.  The effect of pre-removing the Remjet layer is that its antihalation properties are also removed.

What this means is that light can pass through the film and be reflected back striking the emulsion layers a second time which creates halos which are particularly noticable around bright light sources.

It gives Cinestill 800T a different look that isn’t easily duplicated and I kind of like it for that.

Garry Winogrand is quoted as saying ‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.’  so in that spirit I took these infrared images not so much to photograph the things depicted but to see how they looked in infrared.

I used my Sony DSC-V3 in nightshot mode with an infared filter.  A camera that is nearing 10 years old now but has far outlived its expected usefulness.

Yes that’s right this little 110 film camera is actually a rangefinder with a slider on top that adjusts to bring the two images in the viewfinder together and in focus.  I had this already out of date film in the camera for several years treating each frame like it was some sort of precious commodity never to be seen again, which it pretty much is.  The camera itself probably occupies more volume than a 35mm Olympus Stylus Epic and is very heavy so you really need to want to take pictures on a tiny little chip of film to justify using it.  There is no denying that it makes distinctive looking images.  I suppose you could argue that the look might be nearly achieved with processing but where is the fun in that?  That’s also why I’ve left the area around the image in the scans why hide the origin of the images it’s part of their appeal.

I didn’t want to cut the film yet until I figure out the details of a holder for it for my scanner so I made this little ad hoc scanning set up with pieces of black paper to hold it against its natural propensity to curl into a ball like a digital photographer that forgot to charge their battery.

I shot an entire roll of film through my Olympus OM1…twice.  It was on purpose of course and I took quite a bit of care in lining the film up for the second go around.  I achieved this by making a small scratch on the film so that I could align it the same both times.  This actually was harder than it sounds as each time you start loading the film it’s like some sort of random position generator.  The first exposures were all of various line art from old technical books and some of my own block prints.  What I discovered was that such small areas of high contrast like this were not ideal for double exposures.  Many of the line art images are lost in the other second images.  However that is how you learn and improve.  I added a further layer of complexity to my endeavor by making a list of all the images and then trying to make some sort of match between the two.  Here are some of the better examples from this test, in the future I think I would make sure that I used larger areas of dark and light so it makes more of a cut out effect of the second image.  The other thing is that despite the visual contrast of black on the white of paper this isn’t nearly enough contrast.  Not  like what you get from a light source and a silhouette.

 (Yes the picture of the camera is grainy it earned it)

I had high hopes for this camera as it is a compact and is touted to have an excellent 6 element lens.  Those things may be true but unfortunately for me my first roll was under exposed.  I’m not entirely sure if it was a problem with the batteries or the camera but in any case it was consistently under exposing.  Which tends to give you images that look like this viewed at 100%. (Fuji Superia 400)

Despite the exposure issue it is an attractive camera with an interesting design.  It has some similarities with the Olympus XA notably that they both have a sliding lens cover and 35mm f2.8 lenses.  They are of very similar size with the Minolta being slightly taller and they both use a thumb wheel to advance the film and set the shutter.  They differ though in that the Minolta AF-C is autofocus and auto exposure while the Olympus XA is a rangefinder and aperture priority.  Had it not been for the exposure issues I had I’m sure that I would be saying that the Minolta was the better camera to use as the rangefinder on the XA is very small and fiddly.

I shot a roll of suspect slide film in my Yashica MF, I found it in an Olympus OM-10 and it didn’t appear to have been shot.  It seemed like it might be worth a try but apparently I was wrong.  I’m still not certain what happened because the entire roll was blank not even the frame numbers show up which suggests to me that it was actually a failure of the cross processing.  Well it’s not going to stop me but I might be a little more nervous the next time I shoot an entire roll to be cross processed or one I find in a camera.

This is number 17 of my remaining Polaroid Spectra stock I seem to have skipped over number 18 & 19 and will have to scan them but who said I had to post them in order.