More and more film fun with something other than a Leica M

Here we go - 35mm film, versus APS digital. Same subject, same flash(!), just 20 years in between. Oh, the film is the more recent one!


Film vs Digital by chrism229, on Flickr
In the red corner we have an F6, 1.4/85mm, Ilford XP2 Super, Kodak HC-110, Hasselblad X1 scan, and in the blue corner a Nikon D70, and some forgotten kit lens. Both photos used the same Nikon Speedlight, though the D70 on the right side used its tiny supra-prism light as a trigger, thus providing some fill light, whilst the F6 had no such capability and the flash was hard wired and the only light available. I can't say I have learnt much this last twenty years, but there we have it. Subjects grow, but their photographers maybe do not.

I've been off testing and enjoying turning my Leica CL into an ultrawide camera lately, but today I took out the Polaroid SLR670a again and made four photos with it, finishing up the pack of film I started on the Fourth of July. By any technical standard I might consider, they are crap compared to even the poorest photo I've made with the Leica CL. But there is something so charming and lovely about these little Polaroid prints that technical standards are simply irrelevant.

I feel so happy—and so lucky!—to have the option of using either of these cameras.

G

Port Hawkesbury by chrism229, on Flickr

F6, 28-300mm, XP2, HC-110, X1 scan.

Scanned a bunch of instant film yesterday and this portrait of my artist friend in his shop popped out at me.


enjoy! G

I found a film in a drawer, Kodak ColorPlus 200. They sold them for a dollar per roll in developing countries a decade or more ago. Half of the roll was empty, many images were damaged. I must have opened the camera with the film in it. It's taken exactly 6 years ago, just weeks before the woman on the right left her three children with some family members (her boyfriend's family actually, he was in prison at the time) and disappeared. Her youngest daughter, the girl on the left, is now nearly seven and stays with me. The mother called me yesterday and asked for 200 baht (7 dollars) for food.

It must have been taken with the OM-2 and 50mm f/1.4, just in case that matters.

The little girl 6 years later.

Nikon F80 with 85mm f/1.8 and HP5

OM-2 with 50mm f/1.4 and Kodak ColorPlus 200

Mountain Portrait of Trevor Hunt, Canadian steep skiing legend. Chatyn-Tau W (4310m), Georgian Caucasus, prior to us making an awesome first ski descent. May 2013.

Contax T3, Heliopan yellow filter and Ilford FP4+. Hasselblad X1 scan.

Pentax ME Super in 1993, lens, film and development unknown. Scanned from 4x6 print.. Poor devil was surrounded by antiques, books and muzzleloaders. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that.



1993 At My Grandparents House by chrism229, on Flickr

C.

I seem to recall a thread about the Ars Imago "Lab-Box" project on Kickstarter some ages ago, but I cannot find it. The campaign started in February of 2017.

It's been a long, long haul but my Lab-Box has been delivered and is ready for me to test and use.


It looks good, the pieces feel good too. I look forward to learning how to use them and seeing how well they work.
Finally a modern replacement for my 'always getting more ancient' Agfa Rondinax processing tanks ...

Onwards!

G

The lab box is super interesting. Definitely report back with your findings!

Getting ready to test the Lab-Box means shooting some film, so I pulled out my Voigtländer Perkeo II and loaded it up, took two exposures today. It really is a sweet camera! Using it also gives me the opportunity to try out the Voigtländer Kontur accessory viewfinder I bought for it ... and it is fantastic! I'll write a little article about it, I don't know how many people know anything about these bits nowadays.

Fun fun fun!

G

... Instant Magny 35 Experiments ...

While I'm carrying the Voigtländer and slowly shooting my twelve frames to test Lab-Box processing, I've spent some time playing with the Instant Magny 35 device while doing errands and chores around the house.

I played with a few different lenses as I relearned how to make photographs with the Instant Magny 35 fitted to my Leica M4-2. The behavior of the imaging varies quite a lot from lens to lens due to the optical match between the lens and the IM35's optical coupling. The size and position of a specific lens' exit pupil is the key thing ... SLR lenses (R lenses fitted on the R Adapter M to the M4-2), wide lenses which are inverse-telephoto designs, and longer lenses that naturally have a more forward exit pupil perform better than may typical RF lenses. Some examples...

The Voigtländer HyperWide 10mm f/5.6 works a treat on the M and CL digital cameras, but you can see that it's not the greatest optical match to the IM35 with lots of corner/edge darkening.


However, the usable portion of the frame is significant and you can make some lovely photographs with it. The extremely wide FoV is always fun.

I made that exposure a few weeks back and then promptly forgot that the IM35 absorbs four stops of light, not two. Having fitted the Pentax-L 43mm f/1.9 I made these two exposures but they're two stops under... Doh!


The second of them had enough meat in it to stand a bit of post processing and come up with an interesting (if noisy) portrait with a graphic look to it.


I find the texture in it fairly pleasing but I'd have preferred a properly exposed original...

So I then fitted a flash unit and fired off a couple of tests adding one then two stops to re-discover that the total correction was four stops.


Essentially, "set your light meter to ISO 50 and forget it" is what that means, given the Instax SQ film's ISO 800. A flash for indoor shooting becomes pretty essential due to reciprocity factors with that low an effective ISO; a well-exposed portrait of my partner resulted:


The Pentax-L 43mm f/1.9 Special used in these last three frames is essentially an SLR lens optically built into a Leica LTM lens mount. It provides very even illumination across the field of view and is a good match to the Instant Magny 35's optical system. I was interested to see how it compared to the Color Skopar 50mm and 28mm RF lenses, so I picked a standard still life target and took an exposure with each of them, using ambient light and a small tripod for the extended exposure times.

Pentax-L 43mm f/1.9 Special:

Color-Skopar 28mm f/3.5:

Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.5:

These show that the very classic optical formulae of the Color-Skopar lenses that give them their extremely compact form factor simply puts the small exit pupil too close to the optical pipe in the IM35 and the illumination drops off very quickly past a small central area. However, you can have fun with that if you want to be creative and use it to aid in your framing and composition.

With the Color-Skopar 28:

With the Color Skopar 50:

I have to say: the IM35 on a Leica M is probably the most difficult combination to work with due to the RF lenses AND the lack of TTL viewing for focus and framing. If I had a Nikon FM floating around to play with, I'd have done better with that and some Nikkor lenses. Or if Nisnas made one for the Leica R 6.2...

Made a while back with the Super-Elmar-R 15mm f/3.5 adapted to the Leica M mount:


But what the heck? It's all for fun anyway, right?



Oh yes: I want to point out that while these photos were all scanned and horizontally flipped (except the last) to achieve proper left to right orientation, and aside from the heavily processed portrait from the poorly exposed frame, they're all pretty much exactly as they came out of the camera. You can get darn nice results with this setup right out of the camera if you hit the exposure correctly! The film is good and holds detail well, and the use of good lenses on it, properly focused, nets sharp, contrasty, and colorful results.

enjoy,
G

I'm still waiting for my Lab-Box, but in the meantime a motorised Rondinax will do:


Thomas by chrism229, on Flickr

F6, 85/1.4, SB-600 Speedlight, XP2, HC-110, X1 scan.

Same setup:

Pippa 2019 #12 by chrism229, on Flickr

ggibson said:

The lab box is super interesting. Definitely report back with your findings!

Click to expand...

I finished the roll of 120 film I was shooting in the Perkeo II and processed it in the Lab-Box on Saturday afternoon. I did continuous agitation; probably made it too contrasty but it was mostly a test anyway.



If you look carefully, you'll see I lost half of the first frame and there is a lot of extra film at the end of the roll. Chalk it up to inexperience with the Perkeo II ... Voigtländer doesn't provide an index mark for where to align the 'start' marks on the film backing before engaging the automatic film wind/double exposure prevention lock, and I flipped it on a little too early. Next roll I'll run the mark to the center of the film gate before engaging the lock.

Loading and processing went flawlessly. The only minor nit is that it's a little easy to slightly open the dark chamber when you're fussing the tape off the end of the 120 roll. Nothing that a half inch piece of art tape can't cure.

It was very easy to set up and process the film ... From dry to hanging to dry was a total about 25 minutes.
I'll scan the film today if I have the time.

G

Godfrey,

What do you use for scanning? I have a Plustek, but it isn't adjustable, and I get better sharpness with the film upside down. I wonder what it could do if I could really focus it...

Might get the Mamiya 7II out more if I could get a good workflow.

Thanks,

Matt

I have a Plustek Opticfilm 120 and have found that the fix focus is pretty spot on. The only problem is with film flatness so with cuvated film there can be som areas with sligthly less sharp grain, but mostly the grain is resolved nicely. With the USAF 1951 test target I have determined the maximum resolution to be about 4800 ppi but I always choose 4000ppi scanning resolution because of the file size. I don't feel I would need autofocus because with flat film my scanner is so accurate and besides that normal color film has transfer function of details far far less than the test target that probably uses som tech pan or lith film. But if you feel you absolutely need autofocus there will probably be a new autofocus Opticfilm 120 pro, if Plustek can get it in production.

And, yes I also scan with emulsion side down, that gives better resolution.

MGrayson said:

...
What do you use for scanning? I have a Plustek, but it isn't adjustable, and I get better sharpness with the film upside down. I wonder what it could do if I could really focus it...

Click to expand...

I had a Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED. It made superb scans but I didn't like using it ... It was way more than I needed, big and difficult to store anywhere, and took a lot of effort to take it out, set it up, etc. So I sold it.

I have an ancient Epson Perfection 2450 flat bed scanner. It's slow and tedious to use although it makes very good ~2900 ppi negative scans from medium format. Again, I don't use it too often because it is so much effort to use, and so slow.

Nowadays, I scan medium format using a negative copy setup with my Leica CL, fitted with the mount adapters and a Summicron-R 50mm f/2 + ELPRO VIa close-up lens. I have it set up to capture the entire film rebate normally, netting a 3450x3450 pixel image area (about 11.9 Mpixel image) which fits my printing needs well (up to an 11.5x11.5 inch image on 13x19 paper)—I could get just shy of 16 Mpixel by cropping out the rebate when capturing if I need some more pixels.

I built a scanning jig out of a small flatbed light box, a couple of pieces of 280gsm paper, and a thick piece of glass that creates a channel. Once the camera is setup and focused, exposure set, I can draw the film through, frame by frame, and capture very quickly and easily. Setup is a little tedious, but I only do that once and from then on, I can do an entire roll in less than five minutes.

Once captured into DNG files this way, I bring them into Lightroom, invert them, make coarse adjustments and cropping to get them all within range, then output that to 16bit TIFF masters to do finish rendering and editing with. From DNG to TIFF takes only a couple of minutes.

Example from the Perkeo II roll:


enjoy!
G