Articles Written By: Bubble Level

Lighting It Up

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Nikon F6, Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AF, Kodak Ektar 100

Well, I had a blast working on my Roll in a Day / Day in a Roll project this past Saturday.

It was a rainy day and so we were unfortunately stuck in the house much of the time.  I shot more of some indoor subjects and with artificial and mixed lighting than I am used to, but that was part of the fun.

We did make it out for breakfast at one of our favorite places, Gilley's Coffee Shoppe in Los Gatos.  The food is excellent and the staff as friendly as can be so definately stop by there if you are nearby (though beware of the lunch time rush).

I was a bit too conservative in my shooting, by the end of the day I only had around 20 shots total.  I had an idealistic approach of only taking one exposure of any given subject/composition.  I could have afforded to "work my subject" a bit more in a few instances, oh well.

My roll of film is now off to The Darkroom for processing.  They scan your photos and upload them to an online interface where you can access them.  Hopefully this will let me get them on Flickr by next weekend.

One of my earlier resolutions for the year was to streamline my photo editing process, and to that end I have taken the plunge and purchased Adobe Lightroom 4.  The new $150 price point is to attractive to ignore, and I have heard from other film photographers who love working with it.

I haven't read any manual or instructions and just spent about 5 minutes working on the image above.  But I did clone out a strand of hair from the scan, adjust blacks a bit, crop, sharpen, and add a slight vignette.

I can't wait to dig into it some more, but I am BIG read-the-manual-first kind of person.  I will have to see if there is a good book to get me deep into the Lightroom 4 interface.

Roll In A Day

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Lomography Sprocket Rocket, Fujicolor Pro 400H

Yikes, the last few weeks have been busy, and I don't mean photographically.

The daily grind has been keeping me busy, and favorite time of the year (ahem…) has come and gone.  Thankfully I wrapped up our tax return the other night and I can put that behind me until next year.

I need some kind of project to pull me back into my photography and I think Roll In A Day / A Day In A Roll is just the thing I need.

The premise is simple:  Load a roll of film into your camera and shoot it all in one designated day.  Process, scan, and upload the film to your Flickr stream, warts and all.

That's right, upload the whole roll, from shots worthy of being World Press Photo of the Year to bungled exposures.  Join the Flickr group and try to upload your images within one week of the scheduled day.

The next scheduled day is this Saturday March 24th.  I look forward to seeing what all the participants come up with.

I don't think I am going to do anything special this day (like say go on a day trip to Yosemite or even just visit San Francisco).  But it will be fun to capture my day's events in 36 exposures, being as creative as I can be in the process.

P.S. I excitedly told my Dear Sweet Wife about Roll in A Day only to find out she knew about it already.  At least I joined the Flickr group before she did!

UCLA Royce Hall and Lab Update

Royce
Nikon F6, Nikkor AF 24/2.8 D, Fujifilm Provia 400X

I mentioned a while back I have been using some new film development labs and figured I needed to update my sidebar link to include them.  I have done just that, so you can read more about them there.

The short story is that NCPS is my favorite lab for "serious" shots due to the quality of their enhanced scans.  I can still do a bit better job scanning myself if I spend some time with my trusty Nikon LS-5000 scanner, but for anything short of a large high quality print the NCPS scan is magnificent.

The above picture was taken at UCLA's Royce Hall and is an example of an NCPS scan.  Aside from a basic contrast adjustment it is untouched from their file.

I do like The Darkroom for toy camera photos, especially for their sprocket hole scaning service.  Their normal scans don't quite compare to NCPS's, but when opting for the sprocket option they seem to do a very high quality scan.

Lately I have sent most of my rolls to these two labs and seems to be quite comfortable using them.  I do still send our View-Master rolls to Photoworks SF as they are closest to us and the turn-around for a "do not cut" and no scan job is faster that way.

Nikkor AF 24/2.8 D

Green Eggs and Ham

  GreenEggs
iPhone 4S, Instamatic app

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!  Our boys are two of your greatest fans!  (I just might be one too…)

In honor of this day I cooked green eggs and ham for breakfast.  My DSW gave me the idea, and I used one drop of food coloring per egg to achieve the scrambled hue you see above.

(Our boys have only seen this unnatural shade of green before in cake frosting and poked at the eggs hoping that I had given them dessert first.  Sorry to dissapoint.)

Feature Shoot is one of my favorite blogs for discovering photographers.  It just so happens that some of their recent galleries might feel at home inside a Dr. Seuss book:

Doesn’t it looks like the Cat in the Hat might live in one of these tree hotel rooms?

I think the Once-ler might have modeled his thneed factories after these Yugoslavian monuments, for which he harvested truffula trees from large tree farms.

Impossible architecture is commonplace in Dr. Seuss’s works, and these dreamlike environments would fit well inside any of the buildings.

Otherworldy landscapes also abound, including macro environments for the Whos.

Hmm, maybe I am not the only photographer inspired by Dr. Suess…

P.S.  It looks like the sakura are blooming in Japan already.

Spectra Donuts

Spectra
Polaroid Spectra, Polaroid Image Softtone film (expired Oct 2009)

I purchased a Polaroid Spectra camera off eBay recently, they run pretty cheap these days.  This is a big case of tail-wag-dog as I ordered some of the last batch of genuine Polaroid Spectra film from The Impossible Project first.

It was a blast shooting the Spectra, especially since it has the most manual controls (notably flash and AF disable switches) of any Polaroid.

I love the wide image format (compared to the square SX-70 and 600).  And what’s not to like about a camera favored by Shaun The Sheep?

However the expired film didn’t perform well, showing a heavy shift towards red/brown and poor contrast on every image. The battery didn’t even last all ten shots with the shutter failing on shots 8 & 9 and the camera failing even to eject the 10th print.

Nonetheless shooting with the Spectra was a fun experience and I am tempted to get some of Impossible’s Silver Shade B&W film for it next.

And by the way, don’t pass up Stan’s Donut Shop in Santa Clara, CA.  They have the best classic glazed and maple bar donuts we have found yet!

First View-Master Reel

Reel
Photos taken on View-Master Personal Camera, Fujifilm Velvia 50

Our vintage View-Master film cutter and personal mounts arrived early last week and I have made our first personal View-master reel.

The process was actually easy and I am very impressed with the precision engineering of the cutter and mounts.

All you have to do is load your uncut strip of 35mm film into the cutter by aligning the first pair of frames with the cutting holes. Then use the knob to move the film from shot to shot, it clicks nicely into place for each image.

Push down on the cutter and it stamps out the stereo pair of images you are currently looking at.  Take the resulting finger nail-sized film clips, slip them into the tweezers-like inserter, then slide them into open slots in the blank reel.

The only challenge is making sure you have the right side of the reel facing towards you (the one without blank labeling lines for each image) as you insert the film.  You also have to insert the film backwards as if you were looking through it from the opposite direction.

I goofed this up a couple times before I paid good attention to the circle and square guide marks put on both the film and reel.  I will post about this process in more details soon.

Putting my first reel together only took about ten minutes, and I bet with just a little practice it will easily get under five.

There is something magical about seeing yourself and your family in 3D via a View-Master viewer!

Polaroid One Step Flash

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Polaroid One Step Flash, The Impossible Project PX 600 UV+ Silver Shade Gold Edition

We made an impromptu visit to our family in Southern California this past weekend.  We realized that a planned vacation next week wasn’t happening, so we decided last minute to pull off a quick weekend road trip.

My mother-in-law had recently given me a Polaroid One Step Flash camera so I figured it was a good opportunity to try it out. I bought two packs of The Impossible Project’s latest films, the PX600 UV+ Silver Shade (black & white) and PX680 Color Shade.

The camera worked perfectly fine. Or perhaps I should say it worked as designed since the One Step Flash is a rather run-of-the-mill Polaroid. The always-fires flash was somewhat annoying and resulted in at least one completely blown-out exposure outside.

The Impossible film is coming along but nowhere near the quality of the original Polaroid emulsions in their heyday.

I liked the Silver Shade black & white film a lot as it was fairly contrasty and the 8-pack only resulted in one image with a tiny undeveloped patch. Their Color Shade on the other hand seemed quite washed out, and about half of the pictures had fairly large undeveloped patches.

For instant color photography I think I will stick with my trusty Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera and Fujifilm’s excellent FP-100C film.

Perhaps the best thing to come from the Impossible film was a golden dark slide that came on top of one of the packs. This is a Willy Wonka-esque gift certificate to The Impossible Project’s store.

Based on a whim I used it to order some original Polaroid Spectra film which Impossible recently put up for sale.

Do I have a Spectra camera?… Not yet, but I’m working on that!

Seeing Double

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(this shot of the film taken with) Nikon D300, Nikkor AF 105/2.8 D Micro

As my Dear Sweet Wife has mentioned, we have been bitten by the View-Master bug in our household.

In this day and age when our kids have done just about everything possible on our iPhones, it has been a pleasure to see them wildly entertained by our childhood favorite analog stereo image viewing device.

Our six- and three-year olds, their cousins, and a number of their friends have been amazed for hours by viewing wheels about Dora, Cars, space exploration, and other topics.

While we are happy to see the View-Master brand still alive and well after over 65 years, we are getting serious about making our own reels via a decidedly vintage approach!

We purchased a classic View-Master Personal Stereo Camera and have run our first roll of slide film through it.  I shot a number of exposure tests and everything seems to have come out well.

With this success under our wings we have ordered the accompanying vintage cutter device which slices out the pairs for perfect insertion into blank reels.  With luck we may make our first reels in a week or two.

UCLA Sprockets

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Lomography Sprocket Rocket, Fujifilm Pro 400H

One of my New Year resolutions for 2012 was to streamline my workflow and one step I am experimenting with is out-tasking my scanning.

Scanning film is labor intensive, and believe it or not I still haven’t fully processed my box of shame yet.  However in the last week or two I have processed (backed up, put online, etc.) almost ten rolls of film shot over the holiday season.

I did so by using the scan-during-processing options from both The Darkroom and North Coast Photographic Services labs.  I received back from them both discs of scanned images along with my film and prints.

I love NCPS’s “enhanced” scans, and The Darkroom has done a great job on my Sprocket Rocket images like the one above taken at our alma mater.  Neither is as good as the scans I can achieve with my trusty Nikon 5000, but for online use and small prints they work great!

Later I will compare their scanning services in more detail.  For now here are some things crossing my feeds…

Macro Lens Results

MacroFlower
Nikon D300, AF-S 60/2.8 G Micro

We spent some time this weekend playing around with the two macro lenses I rented as well as our own AF 105/2.8 D Micro.  What do we think of them all now?

Both my Dear Sweet Wife and I quickly came to the same conclusion:  The too-short working distance and lack of internal focusing of the AF-S 40/2.8 G Micro lens is a complete show stopper.

While shooting a flower bouquet with the focus locked as close as possible with the 40mm its front frequently came into contact with the flowers themselves.  With any macro subject that isn’t perfectly flat you will find working at maximum magnification very difficult.

On top of that, the front element of the 40mm lens moves significantly during focus changes which alters the angle of view.  If you try adjusting focus at all you will go through multiple iterations of compose, focus, re-compose, re-focus, re-compose, re-focus, etc…

In comparison, the AF-S 60/2.8 G Micro lens was a pleasure to use.  It had a good working distance at maximum magnification; it never came too close to our subjects.  And with its internal focusing feature, changing focus had no noticeable effect on the composition.

There was really no competition at all in our mind: if the 60mm lens is within your budget we can’t see a good reason to even consider the 40mm.  (And if a new 60mm isn’t in your budget, I would recommend a used 60mm over a new 40mm too!)

Keep in mind our goal was to consider these for use with our smaller DX format D300.  If you use a full-frame FX body and/or 35mm film we would still prefer our good old 105mm lens (or its current equivalent).