stephen_jones4

Enjoyable. Thanks for the link.

I thought "Shaimay the day before Eid" was a very attractive image. There's something gently poetic about a couple of the images which I quite value.

Great but I'm not too keen on the lighter edge effect - bit distracting. Otherwise, beautiful light/composition etc.

Colour by a large distance. Agree with Josef above.

Somewhere between 1/30 at f2 and a 1/15 was what I always worked to with a 60watt bulb lighting the scene (in either case, people may well move...)- so I agree with above. Note that 400 speed b+w film tends to be better rated a little slower if you like shadow detail. Also, light fall off is rapid (distance to light source squared) so it can be quite dark in the corners of a room. Also, change your light bulbs to energy saving ones - that way you can have 100 watt brightness for only 15watts. Ho Ho!

They seem like pretty brilliant pictures to me. Ideally I would have seen the captions at the same time as the images (without having to go back to the thumbnails).

I particularly like the second image, which is very painterly to my eye and which I would think of as a highly successful portrait (it certainly seems to gain more than it loses by its slight softness). The attempts at "improving" the first image seem to me to be extraordinarily unhelpful. I think it works very well alongside the other image - the background is intriguing to me. Amazing to see how (genuinely) divergent people's opinions can be. Who knows, maybe there's a subjective element to all this stuff after all...

Trevor - thanks for this: I found it very interesting. Nokton looks like a nice to lens to me.

interesting aperture blades...

Nels

 

... made me chuckle... Must have been the anaesthetic that hurt then.

If you take photographs with people in the foreground, before the point of focus, I've found that their faces are adversely affected by the weird bokeh on the 35summicron asph (at least on my one). I have managed to spoil a few pictures like this. Maybe that doesn't matter too much, but all things being equal, I'd choose the pre-asph if I had my time again.

Michael - as I'm sure you will recognise, I didn't use "multiple exclamation points" to add weight/give credence to my opinion - I used them to draw attention to your (to me, infuriating) response.

It's terribly annoying to be told that I've "presumed to know" anything at all when clearly I haven't. In any case why use such a silly (?pompous) expression - was it designed to be conciliatory/informative or inflamatory? If you didn't mean to be bellicose/aggressive, so be it - it's easy to mis-read the tone of a post.

In any case, as a thought experiment, maybe you could consider the images printed differently and see if what I said has any merit. If not, maybe I'm just plain wrong.

"Wonder what makes someone conclude that the persons interviewed and photographed have not seen the photos or the documentary ? Or presume to know what their reactions were or might have been ?"

 

What an extraordinarily beligerent comment!

Not because I imagine for a moment that it will alter your behaviour but because I get sick of the bullying tone on this forum....

How could my comment beginning "I imagine..." make somebody respond like this? Too much caffeine? "presume to know"? Didn't you see that I wrote "I imagine"? I have no idea whether they've seen the images - I meant that if they had I would imagine that they would feel ill-used. Maybe they've seen them and thought them generous and fair. Personally, I was struck by the fact that the images owed much of their effect to the printing. ...."presume to know" ....!!!!!????? I don't know anything! I had the temerity to express an opinion.

Beyond the heavy-handed, sinister printing - what is there? If these people get to see these images, I imagine they will feel very ill-used.

Barry - I like that very much.

Regards.

Ernst - I want to know more of the juicy details - he looks quite well built...

Like the one in the pharmacy where the woman's sticking two fingers up a t you. Didn't realise this was an international gesture...?

Some stunning compositions. Wistful. As an offering of criticism - perhaps a bit uneven(?). Most of the images are very well-crafted/structured with just a few seeming like "street-fillers". Take that with a pinch of salt - obviously, many of the images are of a very high quality.

Nytex is less prone to mildew/mustiness. Don't store in a darkroom! (why do people do this?). Not great for your back if you fill it up with heavy stuff.

Andy - that's exactly what I meant. I should have made the powder-dust-inhalation vs liquid difference clearer...

Isn't the point that xtol uses no (known) carcinogens and is considered environmentally less damaging than d-76/id-11? I had a failure with xtol which I could never really account for (never had one with any other devloper...) - and there is much speculation about oxidation/packaging faults etc - it's possible I did something wrong/didn't use distilled water when I made it up etc. Personally, I'd like to get back into deving my own film but powder-based dev contatining hydroquinone (a known mutagen/carcinogen) is a little off-putting to me. Maybe hc-110 would be a better choice - Ansel Adams didn't die young...

I reckon the whole deal with rf photography is to try to compose before you get the thing to your eye and then capture what you see. With SLR photography, I think I tend to take the camera to my eye and then start composing. Focusing, I'm sure, is a matter of practice - I used to do what you mention and come back with things out of focus, but after a couple of weeks/months (depending how deeply ingrained the SLR thing is with you) - it's unlikely to be a problem. A key issue is the business of right and left lobe processing - you can only allow yourself to be intuitive once you get the technical bits (like focusing and framing) out of the way first with a r/f.

FWIW I had this once (on one film only) at a "dip and dunk" pro-lab. They claimed it must have been my M6 but I never really believed it. Anyway, it never happened again. Maybe a bit of grit was caught in the mouth of the film cannister (or maybe they roller-transport the films when no-body's looking). Good luck anyway...

Ed - love the Cadillac image. For some reason it makes me think of global warming... Really nice composition elevates it from just a grab shot.

Jim A -

I've seen this before but couldn't remember where. So... just to say it's appreciated. Nice one!