Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Sometimes you see something and just know it belongs with something else.

I was very fortunate to receive this camera.  It came about in an unexpected way.  I have my film developed at Lens & Shutter in Abbotsford and go there on an almost weekly basis.  That in itself is enough to make you stand out I suppose but they also know that I love old cameras and am always carrying a different one.  Well someone brought this camera in and gave it to them.  And in turn they gave it to me,  I am very grateful and can’t wait to run some film through it.  Before doing this I usually give cameras a good once over and this has turned up several issues.  The worst of them is that the standard 50mm lens has been dropped and has damage around the outside edge.  When I test it out I plan to see if there is a point at which this damage has no effect, I’ll do this by stopping down the aperture effectively allowing only light that strikes the center of the lens to pass through.  The other issue with the camera is that the mechanism for the frame counter sometimes jams preventing advancing the film or setting the shutter.  The work around I found for this is to use the frame reset button as you would when the counter gets down to 1.  Who needs to know how many frames are left anyway,  I’m feeling lucky, punk.

Take an underexposed negative, scan and boost almost everything that has a slider in Lightroom.  Ta-da I meant to do that. 

Here is a closeup of  that gives a better sense of the grain from the film.  Lightrooms grain slider is not able to reproduce the organic nature of grain yet it really just adds some noise that can be somewhat controlled.

Some more blossom pictures from the Fraser Valley.

I noticed these trees when I was at the Reach gallery in Abbotsford.  I’ve taken my share of blossom pictures in the daylight so I thought I would try some nocturnes.  I returned  after the gallery opening for the current show.  It’s one thing to look at a print in a book but it’s wonderful to actually stand in front of the real thing, I’m speaking in particular about Betty Goodwin’s vest prints.  Anyway back to the original point, I returned with my Pentax K-7 and took about 60 images varying focal lengths, exposures and even overlaying multiple images.  So here are some of the better results of my experiments.

A reader Dave asked me how I created the high key look of a particular image so rather than going into a wordy explanation I thought I would do it visually, I am a photographer after all.

The image asked about was this one and how I modified it to get that particular look.

The first thing I did was to decrease the colour temperature of the image by 450 degrees to make the image cooler.

This is the result of that change.

The next thing to be done was to add a slight green tint also to modify the overall colour and feel of the image.

 I then increased the exposure about 1 stop.  This is could be done at the time of capture as well but in this case I had a properly exposed image to begin with.

The last step was to desaturate the image and add a small amount of fill light which opens up the shadow side of the tree giving a flatter yet more silvery final image.

Of course any one or more of these parameters could be treated differently and while I like presets for convenience I also believe it’s necessary to treat each image individually to get the best look.