Menu
What's new
The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

Fun with Medium Format FILM Images!

Dang, Graham ... Watching your boy and girl grow up is making me feel time is passing too quickly!
They'll have a heck of a photo album to look back on when they're in their thirties. Fantastic work!

G
 
A couple from my (long ago too……..) youth.
500C/M and CF80 Planar.
This what we knew as the “MDF Plant”, and the “Chip Pile. As youngsters we were able to climb up the chip pile, usually at night, but this was in the good old days before
Health & Safety became a buzz phrase. Unfortunately both display my pet peeve, non-level horizons.

Chip-Mill.jpgChip-Pile.jpg
 
This is a film image taken back in 1980 when as a new graduate forester I was assigned to work on a study of the impacts on New Zealand's native birds of logging in pristine, old-growth podocarp forests at Pureora in the central North Island. This shows the nest of one of our rarer birds, the North Island kokako, an endemic wattlebird, whose populations had been in slow decline for years. This nest was actually in cutover forest and it turned out that the real culprit in its decline was not logging but introduced predators including ship-rats, stoats, and Australian brush-tailed possums. I shot this on a Linhoff Technica V fitted with a 6x7 roll back and a 360mm Tele Xenar. Lighting was from a pair of Sunpack flashes powered remotely by a pair of 9 volt bell batteries - I used a pair of fresnel screens to focus their light into a narrower beam. I created a digital version of the neg using a GFX 100s and an OM 80mm bellows lens. Correcting the colour balance was challenging because of the way that the negative film (Veracolor S?) had aged, leading to differential colour casts in the shadows and highlights. I eventually twigged how to correct this by setting separate black and white points in a Photoshop curves layer.

And the best bit - trialing of landscape scale pest control using a network of traps and bait stations led to the implementation of management that has seen this species undergo a remarkable recovery. In the three years of our study (1979-81) we were aware of only 2 or 3 chicks being produced. In the third summer of intensive pest control over 100 chicks fledged in this area and one pair of birds produced three broods. The conservation threat status of the species has been moved from 'endangered' to 'least concerned'.

-John

Kokako nest Mapara I.jpg
 
John Leathwick said:
This is a film image taken back in 1980 when as a new graduate forester I was assigned to work on a study of the impacts on New Zealand's native birds of logging in pristine, old-growth podocarp forests at Pureora in the central North Island. This shows the nest of one of our rarer birds, the North Island kokako, an endemic wattlebird, whose populations had been in slow decline for years. This nest was actually in cutover forest and it turned out that the real culprit in its decline was not logging but introduced predators including ship-rats, stoats, and Australian brush-tailed possums. I shot this on a Linhoff Technica V fitted with a 6x7 roll back and a 360mm Tele Xenar. Lighting was from a pair of Sunpack flashes powered remotely by a pair of 9 volt bell batteries - I used a pair of fresnel screens to focus their light into a narrower beam. I created a digital version of the neg using a GFX 100s and an OM 80mm bellows lens. Correcting the colour balance was challenging because of the way that the negative film (Veracolor S?) had aged, leading to differential colour casts in the shadows and highlights. I eventually twigged how to correct this by setting separate black and white points in a Photoshop curves layer.

And the best bit - trialing of landscape scale pest control using a network of traps and bait stations led to the implementation of management that has seen this species undergo a remarkable recovery. In the three years of our study (1979-81) we were aware of only 2 or 3 chicks being produced. In the third summer of intensive pest control over 100 chicks fledged in this area and one pair of birds produced three broods. The conservation threat status of the species has been moved from 'endangered' to 'least concerned'.

-John

View attachment 226898
Click to expand...

Wonderful picture, and wonderful story.

I'm a fan of Eliot Porter's work, and this is as close to the kind of bird photography that Porter did that I've ever seen. Bravo!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top