Photography « www.devco.net by R.I.Pienaar

14Sep/090

Snappy Snaps 120 Development

Since moving into my current flat I've not really had a convenient place to develop film so have been putting the black and white shooting on the backburner.

During the last week though I for some other reason thought to ask the Snappy Snaps near me and sure enough they did do 120 black and white. Problem is they wanted £18/roll developed and scanned and want 3 days to do it in.

So I asked around and found out that the Snappy Snaps in Wardour Street London does it for £10/roll scanned on a standard 1 hour wait, that's very good.

Below a scan direct from their scanner, I didn't touch it in any way (click for full size):

You can see some more from this roll here it was taken on Ilford FP4 with my Bronica SQA, this is also the first time in over a year that I touched this camera so was fumbling around a bit, will get back into it now I think especially with a quick development place just 5 minutes from my office.

Tagged as: london, Photography No Comments

30Jan/081

Medium Format Film Photography

I've a fairly short history with film, only started on it in September 2006 and it's pretty much taken over for me from much of my digital camera work.

Since September 2006 I bought quite a few bits of film camera equipment, lenses aside this is what I have:

The most recent additions are the bottom two, they're medium format cameras and something I've been intending to get into for a while. I bought the Seagull on eBay for cheap to see if I like the format and have some great results with it, especially considering it cost only GBP40.

So after loving the medium format as a medium I decided to get a proper medium format camera, I decided on a SLR rather than a TLR so got the Bronica SQA, it's a square format medium format camera with interchangeable lenses, backs and finders. You can even buy Polaroid or digital backs for it to.

We took it out yesterday during lunch for a quick test and I love the shots we got, it's lovely to use though it has no light meter so I use one of my hand held light meters, the shot below and ones it links too were all done with a 1 degree spot meter and metered using the Zone Systems.

I love working with the medium format negatives, they are roughtly 6 cm x 6cm each with big generous borders between negatives. This makes working with them so easy, easy to cut, easy to handle safely without touching the photos etc.

I found my developing results with them were much better than with 35mm, maybe I have just been more careful, will need to see when I do my next 35mm and compare.

Since using film my general photography has improved a lot, I now find that I am forced to spend a lot more time thinking about a shot, putting up tripod, metering it by hand, looking at every bit of detail of the photo to do the metering correctly etc, my % of shots taken to shots that I love is much higher than before and as a result even my digital photography has improved. I take fewer shots and get many more keepers. I think I'll be doing film work till they stop making it.

Tagged as: Photography 1 Comment

17Jan/080

Library of Congress and Flickr

Flickr and The Library of Congress announced a project together to put a whole load of the Libraries photos up and to ask the public to create meta data for these photos - tags, notes etc.

This is a phenomenal achievement for Flickr in my mind, looking through these photos there are some really absolutely amazing shots showing American life in the early 1900s, depression years, the war etc.

I spent some time over lunch browsing some of these, the machinery, clothes, culture, cars, architecture, it is all just amazing I wish there were such a good record of the UK available to the public.

Some of the images are just great to look at like the one below from 1911, that's a hand held large format camera, amazing.

Others show the truly amazing work that photographers did in those days and frankly makes me wish I can even come close to this kind of shot on my digital cameras.

Click on these images and look at them, they are phenomenally well done the richness and dynamic range of color in those shots far out paces the results I tend to see on digital. I wish self developing color slides wasn't such a pain else I'd start doing medium format color transparencies right away.

Tagged as: internet, Photography No Comments

6Jan/071

Creating Photo Panoramas

I've always loved panoramas ever since I got my first Olympus camera that had the on-screen display for composing panoramas. It required - and Olympus still stupidly have this requirement - that you use only over priced Olympus memory.
Things have come a long way since with almost every point and shoot now having a on screen guide for doing panoramas and give away free software for it, but what to do with a DSLR?
There are several methods, you can do them yourself in photoshop or any of a number of apps that require you to carefully line up your photos and make little dots on them etc. but none of these compare to Autostitch in ease of use. You literally just point it at your photos and it does it all, you don't even need to tell it what form the panorama takes.
The end result is a good quality JPG (quality is adjustable) that only requires cropping, below are some examples of what I've done with it in the past. It can not be easier to shoot them, no tripods or anything, just line them up.

Click on each for the flickr page, then click on All Sizes to see big versions of each shot.
I'd definitely suggest giving it a try, it's a great way to get more detail in shots, look for example at the last one in detail you'll see Emma in the shot bottom left to give you a sense of scale, that is 6 x 10 meg pixel images stuck together. More examples by me can be seen here and there is a Flickr Group as well with some excellent examples.

Tagged as: Photography 1 Comment

12Oct/062

moo.com MiniCards

A few weeks ago moo.com launched a very nice service, they take your flickr photos and make small business cards using those photos.
They did a promotion where they gave batches of 10 away I got some of those as soon as they came out and have since bought 100. At US$19.99 it's a steal - the equivalent of about GBP10.

The experience is overall great, the cropping doesn't always come out exactly as expected I have 2 images that I literally just have to through away since they are spoilt but I put about 30 images in so that only really come to about 6 cards. My suggestion is just don't crop with stuff too close on the sides, otherwise I can really recommend it if you want something different from the usual.

Tagged as: Photography 2 Comments

27Sep/061

First eBay experience

I've always been a bit wary of buying stuff off eBay, something about it just always put me off. My recent acquisition of a old camera though is forcing me to give it a go.
I wanted a few things for the camera, a few more lenses I find 50mm a bit claustrophobic, it needs a leather case and some other bits. So I've been looking at eBay again. This past weekend I did my first purchase of a Schneider-Kreuznach Retina Tele-Xenar 135mm F4 Telephoto Compur Lens for my Retina IV camera, the item was a Buy Now and I was happy with the price so I got it.
The lens arrived this morning and is as good as new I'm very impressed with it, here is a shot of my camera with the lens fitted. It came in its original protective case and everything, not bad for GBP24!

I've also bought another Retina camera, this one is a Retina S, very similar to the IV but it includes 35mm and 85mm lenses, bags, kit bag and all the goodies even some thirdparty book on the Retina cameras. Still waiting for this one to arrive though.
The second auction wasn't a Buy Now so I had to way up if I wanted to actually try and bid on it or not, in the end I decided to go with one of the Sniper services. I searched around, there are tons out there with payment options going from monthly, yearly, per item etc it was hard to choose which one. I eventually came across Gixen, it's a free Sniper run by someone who is passionate about doing so and I felt happy to use his service rather than some company I guess it's years of using Open Source. Anyway in the end I got the item after the sniper did it's bid, now I am just waiting for the knock on the door.

Tagged as: internet 1 Comment

26Sep/060

Film Development part 2

Last night I developed my 2nd roll of film, this one went a lot better than the first.
I got the film into the spiral without any hassles at all thanks to some tips on the Flickr "I Shoot Film" group. There are also several other useful resources, a photoset that shows it step by step complimented with some text to describe it and also a very good PDF from Ilford called Processing your first B&W Film.

I am using all Ilford chemicals and film at the moment based on the PDF file above and I am happy with the result so I'll stick to it I think.
In terms of cost, it's hard for me to say exactly now since I bought all the actual equipment from Jessops due to the website I got it from screwing me over, if you buy from the right places and do some research all the chemicals and tools you'll need shouldn't set you back more than GBP60.
There are some recurring costs for the chemicals, below a little table of costs and estimated amount of film I should be able to develop with each:

Chemical:	Cost:	Expected use:
Ilfotec LC 29 Developer	GBP5.68	17
Ilfostop stop bath	GBP3.36	34
Ilford Rapid Fixer	GBP6.96	17
Ilfotol Wetting agent	GBP8.14	100s

Based on the above the cost of each development is around 84p, add to this a fair amount of tap water but that can't really be quantified in an amount.
Films I have bought till now at GBP2.99 each from places like Jessops, but I am waiting a shipment of 25 rolls of Ilford HP5+ from 7dayshop that cost GBP1.89 each.

Tagged as: Photography No Comments

21Sep/060

Film Development

I've recently blogged about my Kodak Retina Reflex camera and wanting to do some development etc.
I ordered all the needed goodies from http://www.firstcall-photographic.co.uk/ who I at first thought had a good service, I mailed them and they confirmed the order was shipped and should be with me today, at 4pm the ordered arrived incomplete! You'd think if you mail them asking for a update they would tell you they'd only ship half of it. Anyway, so I won't be using them again in a hurry.
I rushed into London at the 5pm rush hour to the Jessops and spend another small fortune on tanks, measurement beakers, and all kinds of other crap to get this going and developed my first roll tonight.

There were some hiccups getting the film into the developer tank coil as you have to do this in total darkness inside a bag and it involves cutting bits etc, it really is not fun, so I managed to get some kinks into a frame here and there but I guess I'll improve in time.
Overall I am very pleased with the first attempt you can see most of the roll here.

Tagged as: Photography No Comments

15Sep/061

Some new photography gear

My trusty Nikon D70 has been in for repairs for the best part of a month now, it is suffering from the Blinking Green Light Of Death which is a pretty common bug in the first batches of D70.
It's now around 2.5 years old which is pretty good going for me with a camera, yet Nikon is still fixing the problem under terms of the warrenty, the only problem is it's taking some time.
So I picked up a Nikon D80 2 days ago, the body cost me 600 pounds including delivery and a 2 year warrenty, I also got a Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. I am especially excited about the lens as it was promised to be in the shops last November already but it never made it, I've been obsessivly looking for one but no suppliers have been able to get stock, 3 weeks ago I found one just sitting on a desk in a shop and immediately picked it up.

I am very impressed with both, the combination together is a really good combination and I do not regret the £1100 the set put me back for 1 second.
I've only taken a few shots with the D80, you can see them here.

Tagged as: Photography 1 Comment

30Aug/060

Geotagging Flickr

Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn't too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it's crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:

When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we'd hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!

That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.

Tagged as: Photography No Comments

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