Pix from the last couple of days

[thewayne]

Come to think of it, these are the first photos that I've taken this year, and perhaps the first photos that I've taken in a month. Being sick for a month really takes it out of you!

Eight photos. The B&Ws are processed with a package from DxO that lets it look like black & white film, in this case Tri-X ASA 400. The first four were shot Wednesday, the first out the back door, the other two in my front yard with my Canon 6D with a 24-105. The two of the woodpile and snow shovel were of a straight normal Photoshop process and then converting it to TX400.

The remaining were shot today out of my back door with an SL1 with a 75-300, the 1.6x crop making it an effective focal length of almost 500mm. It was hand-held leaning against the back door, so they're not as sharp as I would like, but it was 23f at noon and I wasn't going to go out to my car to get my tripod! I was looking out at the wind moving the trees and saw the young elk on the west side and mounted up my long zoom. While they're not as sharp as I'd like, I do like the results.

Comments

[moonhare]

Sweet deer :o) We have a small herd that comes through the yard just about daily, though I only see it occasionally.

I loved Tri-X 400! I've got so many old pics using that film. Good for low light, and for faster shutter speeds on my old Canon, it had just enough graininess without being stark (well, unless you wanted stark).

(and this is mondhasen from LJ, btw. I dusted off my account here a few weeks ago when everyone was freaking out over the server move. I don't use it primarily though because I still haven't perfected image embedding here and I like to hit and run)

[thewayne]

Thank you! Yeah, I've shot proverbial miles of Tri- and Plus-X over the years, but in the last decade it's been almost exclusively digital. I tended to prefer Plus-X for general outdoor shooting and Tri-X for sports. The one thing that I really with the DxO Film Pack did was give you different papers -- there was one paper, can't remember whether it was Ilford or Agfa, that had a distinct brown tint to it. It was really nice for certain pix.

Somewhat recently, back in '12, my wife and I did a seven week, 7,000 mile drive from New Mexico to Maine and back with lots of stops along the way. One of the things I did was a bit of an experiment, shooting an Ilford and Kodak B&W film that was C-41 process along side my Canon Eos T2i (before I had my 6D), most of the film was shot on landscapes and beaches in Maine (two sisters-in-law sharing a condo about 10 minutes from the coast!). I was considering shooting film, having it processed, then scanning it and working with it in Photoshop, but I wasn't too happy with the results from the trip, they seemed kinda washed out and low contrast. Then I found out that my local Walgreens no longer had a film lab. While I could probably do C-41 at home, it kinda took the wind out of my sails for that particular project.

This is the photo that initially inspired me to consider doing this. I just happened to shoot it while we were gadding about for a Saturday and I'm very happy with how the shot turned out.
http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/index.php?/tags/30-black_white

It's a Kodak C-41 ISO 400 B&W that I absolutely love. I just couldn't get anything resembling this sort of contrast and dynamic range in Maine, and I'm not sure why. Could've been the processing, I'm just not sure. But this DxO package has renewed my interest!

BTW, in case you hadn't heard and have any interest in film, Ektachrome is supposed to be returning to shelves late this year.

[moonhare]

Those are amazing pictures in your gallery! I love the clarity and the contrasts.

In the early 90's I worked in a photolab that was attached to the screenprinting company that was my main employer. We worked with Ilford films and produced prints up to twelve feet by four feet (I think it was four). I wish I learned more then, but my boss never supported or liked my working with the processing guy and wanted me back on the ink process instead. So much I could have learned... and digital was just coming out mainstream- I recall our head process man saying it would never be able to equal traditional film making.

I gave my film cameras to my youngest son. He in turn left them in unusable condition, though they needed work anyway having been dormant for many years before he got them. All the local film labs went away and the local CVS developing never looked very good (camera or them?).

[thewayne]

I briefly worked at a DIY darkroom in the 80s, the owner was a friend and his wife was going to be out to deliver their second child. It was a tremendous amount of fun! Absolutely awesome place to work: we mixed our own developer from scratch. It was almost impossible to get a developer down to proper temperatures in Phoenix in the summer without ridiculously expensive equipment, so we went with a tropical developer that the owner had worked out time/temperature tables for.

Fun times indeed! It was torn down ages ago to re-engineer the intersection, but I'll never forget it.

[thewayne]

I did confirm that these are, in fact, elk. We get both elk and deer up here, seems to be mainly elk. These are young 'uns. You can tell they are elk by the white butt. I had to double check, one of these photos came up as the desktop wallpaper on my iMac this morning and I was able to verify. We had a small family group of sixish that like our neighborhood with an older momma and a younger male with quite a rack, but I haven't seen them recently.

We also have a prion wasting disease up here! When it's elk season, there's a USDA inspection station that the hunters have to stop at if they've bagged any. They take a sample for testing.

Have you tried Dropbox as an image repository for DW/LJ? It's served me well, of course the link breaks if you delete it from DB. I have my own web site and I've taken to uploading images there and linking them here.

[moonhare]

We live among the whitetails here. We rarely saw deer growing up (hunters, more open land, etc) but since more homes were built and the farms almost gone we have deer come through almost daily. My brother feeds them as my mom did and they have a walkway through our properties.

I have Dropbox and will try that, thanks. I used to use my old website and it worked well, but I don't have a lot of space there.

[thewayne]

It's a quick and dirty way to post prints to social media, but obviously the links break if you delete them from DB. I may be relocating my web sites in a few months, when I do I think I'll make a pubic read-only FTP area that I can post social photos to: need a password to put stuff in it, so it requires minimal difficulty to put stuff up on it, easy to link to for display.