Steve Maniscalco Photography

A Cautionary Tale

This is a gear oriented hobby.  We buy gear, we sell gear.  We list on ebay or in the forums.  We receive gear and we ship gear.

Things can go wrong.

In a recent post, I mentioned that I bought a 90mm lens for the Crown Graphic.  Well, seems the seller was trimming down and selling other items as well.  One such item was a Leica camera (not sure of the details).  The seller apparently became confused as to what was contained in the boxes he was shipping, because he shipped the Leica to me and my lens to someone in Washington state.  The person who should have received the Leica, received my lens and I...I received nothing. 

The post office says it delivered the package to my workplace, but my shipping/receiving folks have not seen it.  We have an excellent staff back there, and because of the nature of our business (medical devices) we have very well defined processes for receiving.  I've checked with everyone on both shifts and no one has seen the package.  On the day I should have received it, I did receive a book, which was left on my desk after hours.

Now, I don't actually know how much that Leica was worth.  I don't know what the model was.  I do know I never met a cheap Leica.  So, it's looking like this seller is out a great deal of money.

Where did things go wrong?  Well, the seller didn't insure the expensive camera and he didn't send it "signature required."  As a result, there is no way to prove that the package was delivered.  The mail man just drops the stuff and goes.  The seller is making calls to the post office, but so far the answer is, "Hey we delivered it...says so right here." I'm ambiguous on insuring packages.  Certainly I'd never insure something that cost less than a couple of hundred dollars.  In this case though, insurance would likely have been in order.

I've got an old Pentax 6x7 and a couple of lenses up for sale on ebay.  When I ship them, they'll go out FedEx.  FedEx will require a signature on delivery.  This is especially important, I think, when selling through ebay.  In my opinion, it would be nuts to send something expensive to a stranger from ebay when that person could turn around and claim never to have received the item.    

Reading

Add "Reading" to my list of things to do when you don't have time to get any pictures taken.  Late at night, when I'm too blown for anything else, a good photograhy book is a wonderful thing.  I can indulge my obsession without "being at the computer" all night and getting on my wife's bad side.

At the moment, I'm about half-way through "Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs" by St. Ansel Adams.  All of us have seen wonderful images by one of the masters and wondered, "How'd he do that?"  Well, in this book, St. Ansel shows 40 of his best and describes both the creative thought process and the technical processes used to make the image.  The images span his long career and much of the technical information is from memory.  While this means the technical info tends to be incomplete, the resulting mix of anecdote and approximation manages to be informative and…for want of a better word…charming.

Reading this is book is like having a conversation with a wonderful old gentleman, telling you how things were done before modern materials and precision devices were available.  You never get the impression that he is longing for the “good ole days, when men were men….”   He fully embraces the technical improvements of his later days and even anticipates technologies to come.

How wonderful it would have been to have that relationship with him in person.  To be overwhelmed in conversation by the art and incredible craft he brought to his subjects. A great many people did have that relationship with Ansel Adams and he is reputed to have been an excellent teacher. 

“40 Photographs” is well worth your time as a window through which to view a great artist as an approachable human being with so very much to offer.  I have a copy checked out of my local library, but since this is one of those rare books I think are worth revisiting again and again, I intend to buy a copy to keep. 

Wide Angle

While shopping for a 240mm large format lens, I came across a good deal on a Super-Angulon 90mm f8.  I'd intended to buy wide later, but the price was right and I gave in to the impulse.

What to Do

What do you do when there's no time to shoot?

Obsess on gear--I'm currently looking for something around 240mm for large format.  I have fantasies involving portrait shots I'd like to take.  Not sure who I'd get to sit for me, but I can dream.

Organize--Well, the negatives are in order.  Now I need to clear off the hard drive of old stuff I'm no longer working on and do my back ups.  You do back ups, right?

Clean my home office--With the last two plastic bins I bought, almost everything is in its place now.  You can, in fact, see almost all of the floor!  It's nice having paper and chemicals put away and organized.

Sell old gear--I've sold off quite a few bits of unused stuff lately.  That paid for the new camera and built a fund for the new lens I want.  More sales to come.

Print old images--I have proof sized prints of all my images offered for sale.  I just print on demand when sales come in.  Now I'd like a large portfolio book with 10x15 and 11x14 images to show off.

Print old images, cyanotype version--I haven't printed cyaontypes in awhile and I miss the process.  Of course, I've got to clean the garage before this one happens.

Make lists of things to do.

TMax 400

  I am both lazy and incompetent when it comes to developing film.  Even so, I manage to get results I am proud of.  I attribute my sucess to one thing, Barry Thornton's 2 bath developer formula.  Basically, it allows me to be sloppy with time and temperature and still get great results. 

I won't argue that better results are not available.  There are a great many folks out there that are masters of the process.  They can and do fine tune every negative to near perfection.  For me though, that's just way too much work.  Frankly, I also doubt my ability to meet those kind of standards anyway.

I have developed many films with Barry's and been pleased.  However, now that I'm going to shoot 4x5, I need to "qualify" another film.  I now need something 320-400 iso.  Tri-x 400 works nice, but is unavailable in 4x5.  That leaves me three choices:

• Kodak Tri-320

• Ilford HP5

• Kodak Tmax 400

Of course, I'd hate to spend $50 a box on each of these just to test them out.  I've asked around the forums, and I can't get much useful feedback, so I'm doing the next best thing.  I'm shooting 35mm film to get a feel for the film/developer combination.  Now, I know there's a big differnce between scanning a 4x5 negative and a 35mm negative.  Still, looking at a 100% crop should show me how the film will perform.

The following images were scanned at 2400 dpi.  The first is a full frame (mostly...cropped to 4x5 proportions) image, downsized for the web.  The second image is a 100% crop from the first, before downsizing of course.

It occurs to me that I really should have scanned at 1200 dpi, since that's about as high as I intend to go with 4x5 film.  I'll rescan and see how that looks.

First Shots on Large Format

Wow. 

First, that was a very different experience, shooting large format on ground glass.  I felt very awkward trying to manage everything.  Thank goodness my son was so patient, because it took way longer than I thought it would.  Of course, I'll improve over time.  I obviously have a great deal to learn.

I was determined to get my first shots taken and developed over the weekend.  Time was tight, as it usually is, so I just set the second son down in a chair and told him to sit.  I have no studio lights, so I added three lamps to supplement the sparse window light.  I didn't worry about posing, I just needed him to sit so I could shoot at him.

All that is to say that I know there is nothing particularly artistic about these images.  They fail as portraits in many ways.  That's ok, I got the job done.  I tested the camera and my ability to develop and scan 4x5 film.

This first shot is an example of a mistake I hope I don't repeat too very often.  Focusing on ground glass means, of course, that the shutter must be open.  However, you really should remember to close the shutter before inserting the film and removing the darkslide.

 

From there, I settled down pretty well.  No prizes here really, but I do think they reflect the potential of the format.  Frankly, looking at the negatives and getting the first scans up...I was completely thrilled!  I just kept thinking, "Wow!  This with a sixty year old wide/normal lens!  Imagine the portrait possibilities with a modern short/tele!

 

 

 

I am seriously in love with those big negatives!

Ta Da!

Arrived in good shape and it's ready to go.  I hope to put a few films through it this weekend, and maybe even brave large format development for the first time.

Wish me luck.

Mystery Solved

Did you ever wonder how your Dad managed to take such horrible pictures on Christmas day?  Well, if you grew up in the 60's, like I did, I think I've solved that one.

These abominations were taken with a Kodak Brownie Super 27.  A plastic fantastic camera that looks like a 110 format rectangle but upsized to take 127 film (I need to get pictures of this thing and post them).

So, Efke 100iso film with flashbulbs.

 I appologize.

 

 

Test Driving Kodak Ektar 100

I don't shoot a great deal of color film...at least I haven't since I started developing my own black and white.  This is mostly because I just like black and white better.  A great many of my color film shots were converted to black and white after scanning.  Cost and quality are also factors.  I soup my own for pennies a roll and I am less likely to scratch or ruin my film than the corner mini-lab.   

Still, I do shoot color for the sake of color now and again.  So, when Kodak announced a new color film, and it started to pick up some positive buzz, I jumped on a few rolls right away to give it a test drive.  Kodak claims that the new Ektar 100 has all the fine grain qualities of the old Ektar 25 plus the obvious addition of 2 stops of sensitivity and the less obvious, but perhaps as important addition of far better exposure lattitude (-1 to +2 stops).  I have no experience with the old Ektar, so I can't tell you if Kodak delivered on it's promise relative to that film.  I can say though that they have created a really fine color film.

To test this film, I employed my usual half-assed, non-scientific methods.  I picked an old camera off the shelf that hadn't been used in a while, loaded it up, and went looking for colorful things to point it at.  This, of course, led to the reminder that Arizona is not exactly the place for vibrant colors (outside of wildflower season and sunsets).  The camera I (almost randomly) picked was an old Balda 35mm RF.  It has an indifferent lens and a working selenium meter.  I realize this is not really giving the film a fair shake, but...there you go.  

Overall, I really liked what I saw with this film.  For my tastes, the colors are rich and intense without being oversaturated.  It scanned easily, giving me very nice files to work from.  One thing I did not test was skin tones.  I just didn't think of it.  Kodak actually recommends their Porta line of films over the Ektar for portrait, so I suspect we may see unrealistic skin tones with the Ektar. 

I'll take a few people shots with this next.  I currently use Porta 160NC as my standard slow speed color film.  The colors are realistic and it's a good performer overall.  If skin tones are reasonable with the Ektar, it might be worth switching to it for the fine grain performance and the really well done colors.  We'll see.

Check flickr for other results.

Lost and Found

Heh...the title seems appropriate in more ways than one.

Yes, I was lost and now I'm found.  I got this blog off to a quick start, then bombed out when life got out of control busy.  There's no hope for me and this sort of thing will just keep hapening now and again.  The only thing to do is to get back going when I can...which is now.  The good news is that all that inactivity has left me with several things to blog about.

For today, we'll deal with a "lost and found" roll of film that showed up in the bottom of a camera bag last week.  It was from a camping trip to Mt. Lemmon near Tucson. 

6x9 home made pinhole camera, Ilford PanF developed in Barry's 2 bath formula.  40 something mm focal length, .25mm pinhole, f144.  Exposure times were 30 seconds to 4 minutes, as I recall.

 

 

 

 

The Mailman Brought

An old lensboard for a Crown Graphic. This was given to me by someone from the Large Format Photography Forum.  Just another example of generosity on the net.  I'll use this board for pinhole work with the Crown Graphic I have on the way.