jnorman1

i have never been a "joiner" and dont belong to anything. but i was wondering if any of you have comments on possible advantages to belonging to one of the professional associations such as PSA, or ASMP or PPA. is there a group dedicated to architectural or industrial photography?

pro photo is surely one of the finest professional photography

suppliers in the nation, and i rely on them regularly for many

specialty products, as well as reliable technical information. i

applaud their efforts to support this LF festival, and i know it will

be an enjoyable and educational experience for all. thanks, guys!

thanks DAB - i see that B&H and Calumet do not carry the neopan

quickload b/w film. nor does my largest local vendor, prophoto in

portland, OR. are there other suppliers for this film in addition to

badger that you know of? being too dependent on one vendor can cause

some serious problems when your projects have a short fuse.

well, i read the very disappointing news about kodak discontinuing tmax100 in the readyload system. i have written them a long diatribe about abandoning the professional market in this way. the calumet person i deal with says there is no other B/W film in a quickload type system available from any other manufacturer (ie, fuji doesn;t offer a b/w film in quickload, no ilford system, no agfa, polaroid is not adequate for archival work for HABS/HAER, etc). however, he did ask his kodak rep about it, and that person said kodak would be planning a b/w readyload film in about a year, but did not know which emulsion it would be. so, where does that leave us? buy a year's worth and stockpile it? do any of you know of other alternatives?

i use the cambo reflex viewer and i find it to be damn near

indispensable. there is simply no way i could do the volume of field

work i do with a cloth, and some shots i could not get at all where

my camera is backed up against a wall or over a railing and i am

standing on my ladder to look down into the viewer. it, along with

the availability of many other affordable 4x5 accessories from

calumet, is one of the reasons i have stayed with cambo cameras for

15 years. i bought the reflex viewer for $150 from jon (f-stops

here) back when he worked at del's. the toyo viewer is like $650.

my intern has been using a calumet 45N for the past year. it has

held up well under the rigors of heavy field use and seems adequate

for most professional work. it's best attributes are the

availability of a wide variety of interchangeable parts at reasonable

prices, sturdy construction, and solid resale value.

i have always been a dyed-in-the-wool "print straight from the

negatives" person, but i have recently changed my mind. i just had

to do some 4x5 CTs for some HABS/HAER work, and some color neg work

for an FHWA project. the hand prints from both those projects were

less than satisfactory to me, so i had the lab scan the CTs and negs

using their new imacon flextight precision #2 scanner at 300dpi.

from there they were imported into photoshop, and sent to a fuji

frontier digital printer and onto fuji crystal archive paper - holy

moly! the resulting prints were among the best color prints i have

ever seen, far better than the hand prints made by the same lab.

total control over color balance, exposure, etc. henceforth, this

will be the process i will use for all color work.

do any of you have links to technical research on the archival stability of digital color prints made on fuji crystal archive paper? for repository purposes, the preferred process by the LOC at this point is color xerox prints on archival bond, and i would be interested in finding some research that compares the stability of such processes.

pat is steering you right on EI. i have shot 1000s of tmax100 negs

and have found that i generally must expose it at about ASA 50 to get

a full tonal balance in my negatives.

nic - nice software. it occurred to me that you might want to pursue

marketing this type of software to the HABS/HAER organizations in

regard to their ongoing efforts to digitize their collections for the

library of congress for posting on the internet. currently, they

post four versions of each LF image (scanned from the original negs)

- a thumbnail view on the index, a low resolution jpg (60k), a larger

size low resolution jpg (150K), and a high resolution jpg (~20mb).

your software might be a very effective alternative to their current

system. you can take a look at some of their database images by

doing a search at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/hhquery.html - if you

want to pursue this, you might want to contact the HAER chief, eric

delony at (202) 343-4237, and/or the HABS chief, paul dolinsky at

(202) 343-4227.

i do documentary work in remote locations fairly regularly, and i

generally carry enough sheet film for about 100-150 shots. since

there is no way i can carry 50-75 film holders, i use the kodak

readyload system - i carry one film holder and 5 boxes of readyload

packets. i would be very hard-pressed to do my work without this

efficient, light-weight system. the system does take a bit of

getting used to, and a bit of experience to learn to handle the

packets correctly - if you are not careful, you can easily not close

the darkslide cover on the packet all the way and fog the edges of

the negative, or if you do not seat the packet securely in the

holder, you can pull the negative out along with the darkslide

without noticing it and not get a shot. however, after understanding

how the system operates and how to deal with these issues, i have

found the readyload system to be indispensible. good luck.

wow! the thought of trying to deal with hand processing film that

large seems pretty overwhelming to me (though i can remember when i

was sure there was no way i would ever be interested in using a big

bulky 4x5 monorail camera). as a serious admirer of the 19th century

mammoth plate photographers such as watkins and baldus, i would just

like to give my most sincere encouragement to those of you who

endeavor to create images at such a magnificent scale. i have

closely examined the ~21x28" contact prints of many of watkins views

from oregon in 1867, and if he could do that with the optics of that

period, i cannot imagine how incredibly fine a well made contemporary

20x24 inch contact print might look!

a question a few threads back made me think how interesting it would be to to see the work of some of the contributors here. we seem to have a wide range of both technological expertise and photographic vision represented here. some of us do commercial work, some are artists, some teach and some are learning, some, apparently, simply live photography. if there is a website where your work is displayed, please post the URL and let's share some of what we see in the world. (i do HABS/HAER work in oregon - bridges, historic architecture, etc. - http://www.odot.state.or.us/eshtm/cult.htm )

the aperture adjusting lever on my nikkor sw90 is loose and is easily knocked out of position while working. i am going to take the rear part of the shutter apart to examine it and see what might be wrong, and figure out a way to stiffen up the movement of the aperture lever. any advice on procedure, or "watch out for..." comments would be appreciated. also, if you might have any idea what the problem might be, and/or possible fixes, i would appreciate hearing your thoughts.

what a great thread - i am a huge fan of mammoth plate views, and

have studied with great interest the works of 19th century masters

such as carleton watkins, eduoard baldus, and a j russell.

fortunately, at the oregon state archives next door, they have an

original folio of "photographs of oregon and the columbia river" by

carleton watkins from his visit here in 1867. the folio has an

embossed, leather-bound wooden cover, with some type of sewn cloth

signatures to which the pages are attached. a classic title page and

some 60 or so albumen contact prints of his mammoth plate negatives

are mounted to the pages. the contact prints are about 22x30", and

are simply amazing considering what he went through to produce each

image (pack in all the chemicals, equipment, glass plates, portable

darkroom, etc., by mule and/or small boat - set up the darkroom at

each location, prepare the chemicals and plates, expose the view,

develop the plate, etc., and pack it all back to san francisco

without breaking all the plates) - nothing short of a miracle.

 

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anyway, a couple of you mention a 12x20 camera - does someone

actually make a 12x20 camera and film holders, or did you guys custom

build them? does someone make 12x20 film, or are you somehow cutting

your own film? one of the most interesting things about mammoth

plate work is how it affects your approach and composition. watkins

understood this intuitively, and while many of his mammoth plate

images look odd when reduced to fit the pages of a book, when you

view them at the size he actually shot them at, they reveal

themselves as true masterworks of photographic vision.

i applaud your ingenuity - sounds like a good solution to a common

problem. i long ago stopped trying to use a hard case - too heavy,

too awkward to carry. for the past several years, i have used a

"california cooler" (a collapsible picnic cooler) - it is a box-

shaped, padded, soft case that fits my short-rail cambo perfectly by

sheer coincidence. since the bag has zipper access to the padding, i

was able to add some additional foam to make it form-fit my needs. i

carry the camera upright - rail at the bottom - so it is a breeze to

pull out and set up. the bag is light, very sturdy, easy to carry,

and cost about $30 at a sporting goods store. i use an eddie bauer

black shoulder bag to carry lenses (in calumet wraps), accessories,

readyload holder, and several boxes of readyload tmax100.

you are talking some serious computer horsepower just to open a file

of that size, much less manipulate it with any dexterity. but it

wont be long before terahertz processors and gigabites of RAM are

commonplace, and digital imaging will truly rival even the finest

large-format chemical process. an additional consideration for those

of us in the field of recordation is the archival quality of the

"hard copy" images, and a secure method for long-term storage of

digital image files. i wonder how long it will be before the

library of congress allows digital imagery and prints as an

acceptable format for HABS/HAER documentation...

it depends on what you mean by archival. i recently started stamping

the prints that i send to HABS/HAER, and i was unable to find a

single commercial source for an ink acceptable to the LOC. they mix

their own ink in-house, and sent me some. the other aspect of this

is the ink pad itself - they would not allow a normal pad, it has to

be end-grain balsa wood. they also provide very detailed guidelines

for using the stamp and ink. many of the HABS/HAER guidelines and

standards are available on their website and/or the LOC site.

my daughter will be entering USC next fall majoring in photography. she wants to do studio-type fashion work, i think. i was planning to get her a used hasselblad 500cm w/80mm to start. the lady she is apprenticing with uses a hassy for color work and a nikon for her b/w work (her specialty), and my daughter thinks she would rather take a nikon to college. i cant afford both, and dont want to intimidate her with a medium format camera if she wont carry it around and use it like she would a 35mm. if 35mm, she wants auto-everything, whereas i would rather get her an F2 or F3. on the other hand, i cant help but feel that the future of photography (other than what we do with LF, of course) is in digital - my cousin has moved almost entirely to digital for his commercial work, and frankly it looks pretty darn good at 8x10). what do you guys recommend that i send her off the college with?

thanks to everyone for your comments. a little more info on my

requirements - from now on, when i do a HAER recordation project, in

addition to the normal archival prints, i need to scan the 4x5

transparencies and b/w negs for transmittal to the library of

congress as part of their effort to get the HABS/HAER collections

online. the guys at calumet suggested the agfa t2500 duoscan - a

combo flatbed with a lower drawer for transparencies and negs up to

8x12" with no glass plates (no newton rings?). it is about $4500.

management will have a hard time even giving me that kind of budget

for this, so - is it your collective opinion that this one would do

the job, or is there another in that price range that might be

better? or, should i accept that i cannot afford the required

quality, and continue to pay a local graphics house $35 each for my

negative scans?

 

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to get an example of what kind of quality LOC is looking for (one

they scanned themselves), the highest resolution scan of one of the

5x7 b/w negs is a *.tiff file at about 17.5MB -

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-

bin/displayPhoto.pl?path=/pnp/habshaer/or/or0200/or0291/photos&topImag

es=130784pr.jpg&topLinks=130784pv.jpg,130784pu.tif&title=1.++General+v

iew+from+northwest+%3cbr%3eHAER,ORE,26-PORT,14-1&displayProfile=0

i need to purchase a 4x5 negative scanner for my office. we have a very nice HP flatbed - is there an attachment i can use for that machine, or should i go with a stand-alone neg scanner? what are some of the better units to consider? what is the prince range for this kind of equipment, and what advantages do the more expensive units offer? thanks for your advice.

i use a 135mm schneider for a large percentage of my architectural

work. my 90mm sw nikkor accounts for a smaller, but also significant

percentage. my 210mm nikkor is my telephoto for details, and is used

surprisingly infrequently, though it is just as essential to have

available when it is needed. i have never found the need for a 75mm

for exterior work, though i have rented one on occasion for some

interior work.

generally, dust problems on negatives occur during the drying process

after you have processed your negatives, not during the exposure.

perhaps a more controlled drying environment is needed. another

possibility is that what you are seeing on your negatives is not

dust, but rather impurities in the water you are using to wash the

film. there are inline filters which can address that problem.

i always use linen tape T-type hinges. for larger print sizes, i use

more than two hinges. no hinging can be considered "permanent", but

it is still the preferred manner of mounting for museum purposes.

for prints larger than 11x14, i use 8-ply backs and fronts (100% rag

museum board).

indeed, bill - i am greatly interested in the history of photography,

and have collected a very nice library on the subject. i own about

20 fine albumen prints, mostly the work of the major architectural

and topographic photographers of the 19th century, including baldus,

le gray, watkins, and marville, along with many others from europe

(ponti, alinari, fenton, macpherson) and the orient (frith, beato,

sebah, du camp, etc). the name fly does not ring any bells from my

readings, and i just browsed through mayb 10 or 12 of my principal

references and did not turn up his name. so his significance may be

more on a local level, and your best bet might be to contact the

state historical society and talk to the photographs librarian.