Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Some more images from my walk at the Golden Ears Bridge.  While these are pictures of the same subject you can see that by varying elements you can create entirely different impressions.

I had planned to take pictures in a particular location but was thwarted by the weather so I went for a walk on the Golden Ears bridge instead.  It turned into a great image making opportunity.  These four images are just a few of what resulted but I have grouped them together thematically.  As you can see these ones share several elements:  the bridge, the colour processing, occurring against the light.  While I didn’t get the source material for a painting as I had planned I’m pleased with the way it worked out.

I received my final set of slides back yesterday from Dwayne’s Photo which was the last place on earth still processing Kodachrome.  A part of me  feels a mournful nostalgia despite the fact that in actuality I had stopped using Kodachrome in any meaningful way years ago.   An incredible amount of history was recorded with this film and we can be grateful because it was the most stable early colour film and many 60 year old slides remain unchanged.

I wasn’t thinking at the time about highway 416 (Veterans Memorial Highway) but the colour does remind me of a poppy somewhat.

If density were a criteria for choosing a camera this one would be a winner.  Well it still is a winner but more so because it is a great camera.  OK I admit I say that about many of the cameras I shoot with, but that’s often why I choose them.  Some of the fun quirks of this camera are that you need to operate the film advance lever twice per exposure to cock the shutter and advance the film, the back comes right off to load the film and the shutter release is a lever beside the lens.  Did I mention it is very dense.  Everything is packed into a tiny solid package, I can walk around just holding the camera in the palm of my hand.  There is no light meter and I didn’t have one with me so all these images are “exposurtimations“.  Hey it’s my blog I can coin words if I want.

There is a lot of discussion around the light gathering ability of current digital SLR cameras at this time on the Internet.  In case you are absorbing this post at some future date I am writing this in 2010 back when cameras could only capture images in murky darkness not inky blackness.  Sorry about the fossil fuel thing, who new?  Anyway back to the present, so there is all this discussion regarding which brand and which model of camera has the best signal to noise ratio and processing engine in order to make all images look the same no matter what circumstances you decide to take the picture in.  Well before such a comparison is no longer possible do to the dwindling availability of a thing called film I though I should provide some perspective.  I took some images with Kodak MAX 800 film and took similar pictures with my Pentax K-7 DSLR set at a comparable ISO 800.  So when discussing ISO speeds of 12,800 and greater perhaps a small reminder of how much has changed in a few short years is warranted.

Pentax K-7 ISO 800

Kodak Max 800 taken with a Pentax ME Super.

Pentax K-7 ISO 800

Kodak Max 800 taken with a Pentax ME Super.

As an addendum I’m aware that this wasn’t the best possible film to use but it is what I had on hand and I also didn’t do any noise reduction on either the film or the digital files.

A few more Minolta X700 shots.

I’ve taken a try at recreating the look that my Pentax K-7 generates using the digital reversal filter (slide filter).  It appears that it isn’t that simple a matter and that the processing may vary depending on the source image.  When optimized for one image it may produce different results on another.   It still makes an admiral effort and has a look all it’s own.

Original file

Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4 (Reversal)

Wallace’s Lightroom Reversal Preset.

You can see that while there is a close match in these images (blues and yellows are a bit of a problem) the results diverge even more on some real world images

Original Image

Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4 (reversal)

Wallace’s Lightroom reversal preset.

You can download this preset by right clicking and saving the target file to your computer.  You can also find out how to add this or any preset to Lightroom by doing a Google search.     Download Preset

My first serious camera that I bought for myself was the Minolta X700.  I still consider it one of the last great manual focus SLR cameras and it has always been reliable and accurate.  It was first introduced in 1981 and apparently it was made right up until 1999.  I purchased mine in the late 1980’s at a department store across the border in Washington state.  I’m not sure how many rolls of Kodachrome 64 I ran through it but where ever I traveled it went along.  I recently shot two rolls of film with it and was reminded why it is so good.  It is functional, without frills, with easy to control settings that don’t get in the way of creativity.

Here is another example of using multiple exposures to extend the effect of time.  I had set my ISO to the lowest value available (100 ISO) and had stopped the lens down as far as I wanted to without having to compromise image quality, so this put me in a position where I had a shutter speed of 1/2 a second.  This is certainly enough to blur the fast moving water but not enough to give it that soft gossamer look I wanted.  So I set my Pentax K-7 to do 9 exposures with auto EV adjustment.  I also used mirror up and remote triggering to limit any camera movement.

K-7  70mm, f11, 0.5 sec

K-7 70mm, f11, total exposure time 0.6 seconds from nine individual exposures.