david_goldfarb

I'm fairly sure the T-90 needs a circular polarizer if you want to meter through the filter. It's generally recommended with most later Canon bodies that use a beamsplitting prism in the focusing screen to direct light to the meter.

 

I wouldn't bother with a polarizer on a 20mm lens. In certain scenes it can work, but in general, particularly for landscapes, you'll get uneven polarization with a lens that wide. In that situation a graduated ND is more effective.

David Hockney is the one who has proposed that the camera obscura and camera lucida were used in the Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age. If you look at some of Vermeer's paintings, there is a plane of focus, which you would only expect to see in a painting made with an optical device like the camera obscura.

 

On the other hand, if you look at paintings by the contemporary realist painter Rackstraw Downs, you would swear that he was working from images made by a swing-lens panoramic camera like a Widelux or Noblex, but I've seen him working in the field myself, carting large panoramic canvases around New York City, working across two easels, returning to the same site every day for a period of weeks.

Using software perspective correction is like tilting the easel on an enlarger or tilting the back on a view camera. It will correct convergence in one plane, and is a handy trick sometimes, but it doesn't always work. The only equivalent to using front rise on a view camera is to use a wide lens, level the camera and crop the excess foreground.

All my classic Voigtlander filters are slip-on filters. The threads are probably for something like the retaining ring that holds the front element of the lens in place.

Once I had left my Vitessa-L in a coat pocket closed with the lens shade floating around in the pocket, and came back to it later to find my coat on the floor. The camera was fine, having been cushioned by lens shade, which was a total loss. Haven't found another lens shade since (but maybe I should sell the lens shade box on eBay).

 

The worst was once when I was shopping for some cable releases for my Linhof Tech V (no, I didn't drop the Tech V!) at Calumet, and I had the camera in a bag set up to shoot with the grip and finder attached. En route the finder had been slowly slipping off the shoe, so I took the camera out of the bag and set it up, and then watched in slow motion as the finder went tumbling to the wooden floor. Fortunately, it was the old style finder and not the new $1200 one. The pin in the distance adjustment mechanism broke, and I think it cost around $80 to fix.

My 5x7" Press Graflex is pretty strange, I suppose.

 

Not exactly a strange camera, but my strangest setup is this--I've made a short rail from cherrywood for mounting my ultralight Gowland 8x10" pocketview on a pistol grip, kind of like a Sinar Handy. I have a 120mm lens for it, and I have it set to focus in two positions--6 ft. and infinity. I need to make a viewfinder for it, and I'll be able to use it like a Hobo.

Yup, Pliobond.

I'd also recommend RB67's. They are workhorse machines, there are a lot of used ones out there, and service is widely available for them.

There was some time in the 1950s, I think, when ASA standards changed, and all films were uprated one stop. The box speed of Super-XX was ASA 200 at least since the late 1960s. It was always one stop slower than Tri-X. Pan-X was the slowest, then Plus-X, then Super-XX, and then Tri-X.

 

Double-X, which is not the same as Super-XX, is a 200 speed B&W cine film that's still made. You can shoot it in 35mm as a still film.

Super-XX was made in sheet sizes into the 1990s. I have part of a box of 8x10" in the freezer that expired 10/1994. I'm saving it for some special landscape project. Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee bought out the last of the stock.

I'd also recommend consulting a lawyer, but on the other side of it--you were in Antarctica for six months and you only shot 14 sheets? If something is important, it's not unusual to shoot at least two sheets per setup (when possible--which it isn't necessarily with long exposures, of course) in case you want to adjust contrast with development time after seeing a proof of the first sheet or in case the film is damaged or if there is dust on one sheet. Get what you can from the lab, but if anything, this experience is a reminder that all sorts of things can go wrong, and I'd imagine there's no monetary compensation that would really replace the lost shots (well, maybe if they can cover another 6 months in Antarctica).

I agree that this was natural light in a studio.

 

Some films had and continue to have retouching surfaces on one or both sides, and in general, it's usually possible to retouch on the emulsion side with plates or film, but the old retouchers also used a retouching compound that would add some texture to the negative. There were different formulas for this compound, some just thickened turpentine, and there were commercial preparations available. To add a lot of density, it could be used on both sides of the negative, and some retouching compounds were amenable to layering, but in some cases a second layer would remove the first layer and create a mess.

 

Other retouching techniques used included etching with various blades like X-acto knives and abrasion with abrading tools and abrasive reducing compound. I've made this compound with brown tripoli and mineral oil. It can be used to tone down hotspots, which appear as dense areas on the negative. Etching with a knife is tricky and takes lots of practice. I certainly haven't mastered it yet myself.

 

With film negs you can use a tool like a needle perpendicular to the base surface to prick the base in a random pattern to eliminate pinholes or spots from dust on the film during the exposure.

 

All etching and abrasion should be done before any pencil or dye retouching, because if you go far with the knife, you can often fix it with the pencil.

Outdoors, I think any background system is going to need sandbags and possibly guy wires.

I also have the Savage, and it's fine. The Savage comes in two widths (I think 9' and 12'). Unless you are sure you need the wide one, get the narrower one, if portability is a concern. It's less bulky and it's not as heavy.

I'll also agree with Jeff (who's first book will be entitled _The Closest Thing that Matters_). Another approach that Weegee and Cartier-Bresson used is to memorize one or two distances, and always try to be that distance from the subject. For Weegee, this was particularly important, because he always used flashbulbs, so both focus and exposure depended on distance.

 

With an SLR and a waist level finder, some pre-focusing, practice, and a little margin for error, you should be able to focus easily enough.

These found film threads are really delightful. Thanks to Gene M for promoting this genre. They really show that for all we worry about equipment and such, these shots that are often poor in every technical and compositional respect still have value and interest, just because they show how the world looked at another time and how even some anonymous person looked at the world then.

 

I can just imagine that guy saying, "Stand up on the diving board, honey, and let's make a picture," as if it were the most natural thing in the world to pose on a diving board.

A further thought--the lens is probably a standard Rapid Rectilinear type, which would have been fairly common at the time. You don't see the glow in the highlights you would expect from a soft-focus lens, which would have been more popular a little later than this photo, and would have been considered a much fancier, more expensive lens.

Looking more closely at the enlarged shot, you can be fairly sure there was pencil retouching on lines in the face and perhaps some softening of the shadow under the chin. I was surprised to see how sharp the eyes are, given the likelihood of a 10-30 sec. exposure at f:5.6 or f:8 (a fast portrait lens would be around f:4 max, and with a composition like that, bellows factor would be around 1/2 stop for that format, plus maybe one stop for reciprocity, assuming a film speed of around EI 6-12), but that's probably retouching too. It was fairly common to retouch the irises to make them lighter, and ink or heavier pencil could be used on the whites to make them really white and clean up any ghosting from eye movement. This work was all done on the negative.

That's probably natural light in a studio with large windows and possibly skylights. A fancy studio would have louvers and curtains to control the light.

 

Centennial POP isn't albumen paper as far as I know, although it comes from the Chicago Albumen Works. You can coat your own albumen paper though. Go to www.bostick-sullivan.com for info on making albumen paper. Info on POP can be found here--

 

http://www.albumenworks.com/printing-out-paper.html

 

Much of that look comes from hand retouching with pencil on the negative, which was standard for portraits.

Indeed, there's pyro cultishness, amidol cultishness, Rodinal cultishness, digital cultishness, Zone System cultishness, BTZS cultishness, Leica cultishness, Hasselblad cultishness, Acutol cultishness, Minox cultishness, Gigabit cultishness, folding tourist camera cultishness, bokeh cultishness, and all manner of other sectarianisms to be found on photo.net.

 

Pick your poison.

 

Enjoy your symptom.

It's a risk a fair number of people are going to be taking, and it's the product of a good deal of research by reliable people.

 

If you're working with amidol, wear gloves, avoid breathing the dry powder, and take normal precautions.

 

Amidol doesn't provide much of an advantage with most modern papers, but it does produce richer blacks and allows for water bath control with certain papers like Azo and Maco Expo RF graded, and if you use those materials, it's worth trying amidol. In one controlled test, Sandy King demonstrated that you could get almost the same density curve from Ansco 130 and Azo as you could with amidol, but you couldn't get the water bath effect with 130.

 

If amidol isn't of interest to you, then no one is obligated to use it. I've been getting results that I like with amidol, so I'm going to continue using it.

If you're looking for a less expensive source of amidol, go to http://www.michaelandpaula.com/mp/index_skip.html , and navigate to the "chemistry" section in the Azo forum, and look for the thread "Amidol for $28/pound." It's going to come out to about $50 a pound, but that's about 1/4 of the usual cost.

Looks a little like Agfa A-47.

 

750 ml water at 38 deg. C

100 g Sodium sulfite (anhydrous)

20 g amidol

water to make 1 liter

 

Dilute 1+3 and dev. films for about 5 min.

 

Dilute 1+1 and develop paper 1-2 min.

Yeah, your name is a perfectly good, professional sounding name. No reason for hokey sentimentalism.

My favorite 50mm lens is the Voigtlander Ultron 50/2.0--really sharp and really smooth. Mine is the fixed lens on the Vitessa-L, but they also made it for the interchangeable-lens Prominent.