I’m going to be having a little show of prints at Studio Todorovic tomorrow, May 6th from 6PM to 9PM.  I’ll be displaying a selection of framed, artist-pulled 16×20 silver prints.  They’re going to be available for $500-550 framed.  I will also have unframed 8×10 silver prints for $50.

I’ll be present to talk about the work and answer questions.  The address to Studio Todorovic is as follows:

Art Central, Main Level
100-7th Ave SW
Calgary, AB
403-450-1917

These will be on sale soon for $300 CAD, mounted and matted in 3.5″ border matts.  They’re printed on Ilford Multigrade Fibre paper, warm tone.  I find this paper’s tone suites the timeless printing method, the contrast is astounding when using it properly and it’s more archival than resin coated (RC) paper.  One’s been sold already.  As of right now there are 4 out of 5 available.

Kodak Portra 400NC has been a difficult film to match with a subject for me.  It wasn’t until I came across the blog of a photographer named Jonathan Canlas that I discovered the look of Portra 400NC when overexposed by two stops.  I now consider 400NC a great film for skin tones and retro architecture.  It renders warm tones and cyans perfectly.  I had taken photographs of The King Eddy before using my Canon 5D but it was never this easy to capture it’s retro beauty.

This gent was quite the character.  He couldn’t hold still long enough for me to take a picture of him however he was practically begging for the camera to stay focused on him.  He called himself a photographer and film maker, showed me a sketch book he had been working on for a while and almost kept my sun glasses.  He was an interesting fella and I hope I run into him again.  I’ll probably not get another chance to snap a shot of him without a misfocus.

Yesterday our acreage in Conrich, Canada was snowed in.  There are still snow drifts out there up to my chest so I’ve been taking advantage of the indoor time by working on some of my negatives.  I’ve decided to call this one “Echoes of Ruination.”  It was taken in the old Molson Brewery before it was locked tight.  You can’t get in there now and I hope people don’t cut locks or something silly like that to get in there.

This is a raw scan (resized down to 600 pixels) and you can see it’s quite muted and washed out.  The cement and the skeleton took on very similar values and this scan sat like this since October, 2010 because I didn’t really know how to approach it.  I’ve gained a little bit of “Photoshop know how” since then and I decided to take a crack at it.  You can see I altered it quite a bit from the original in order to get something  as striking as what I saw in person.  The world’s greatest storytellers have a knack for exaggeration and I determined I would have to change the photo quite a bit to give the same impression that I had when viewing this on the cement in the old building with my own eyes.

Process for 3:30 min then dump it back in the developer bottle. Dump in the “Blix” and process that for 6:30 min. Dump that out and pour in the “Stabilizer” and process that for 30 seconds to a minute with 15 seconds of aggitation. Squeege/sponge off, hang to dry and then scan! Simple as that!

I did two sheets of 4×5 Fuji 160S and this is the one that turned out.  It’s amazing how much dynamic range and detail is in a scan of 4×5 colour.  Absolutely insane!  The scan is about the equivelent of 98 megapixels.  When USM’d and sized to pixel peeping sharpness it’s about 70 megapixels.  I’m not too keen on the colours Epsonscan gives for colour negative scans so tomorrow I’m going to install the Silverfast that came with my scanner and give that a try.  Next month on payday I might buy Vuescan if Silverfast doesn’t work out.  Here’s a detail from the scan above:

Unfortunately one of the shots didn’t turn out.  I didn’t have the 4×5 back on my Wista 45SP correctly so there was a light leak.  I wish it exposed correctly because the contrast of this negative turned out very cool.

Update (Dec 23rd): I did a scan with Silverfast SE which came with my V700.  The colour accuracy is much higher with it.  I think I might use silverfast for my colour negative scans in the future.

Update (Jan 9, 2011): I’ve decided to include this Youtube video that shows how easy C41 is.  It’s really is this easy.

This is the construction site for the second phase of The Bow, being built in Calgary, Canada.  I don’t know what’s under the wrappings but it’s well lit ;).  It was shot on Efke 100 pushed to approximately 200 by developing it for 6:30 in Ilfosol 3 1:9.  Last time, for daylight photography, I developed it for about 5 minutes and the tonal range was super wide so I figured it should be fine with some pushing.

Most of my exposures were under-exposed tonight, unfortunately.  Either that or the development time needs to be increased.  I suspect it’s the later because I was metering off the street surface for most of my shots.

I got 50 rolls of expired panchromatic film from a friend the other day.  It’s rebranded Efke, it looks like, and I shot & souped a roll today.  I use a Canon Elan 7e for 35mm work and the rapid fire shutter can burn through a roll pretty fast.  Overall the film’s not bad for 35mm.  It’s not the sharpest but what can you expect from such a small format?  It makes me fascinated at what digital SLR sensors can pull for sharpness.

Where it’s lacking in sharpness it makes up in dynamic range, however.  There were some photographs that recorded about 20 stops of dynamic range.  Crazy!

This was shot through my Zeiss 35mm T* 2.0 and souped in Ilfosol-S for 7.5 minutes.

I tried rotary processing my 4×5 negatives for the first time.  Ilfosol-S and FP4 125 looks amazing together when rotary processed.  It almost looks like HDR!  Unfortunately I had a problem with impropper fixing.  I’m using a very old “Simmaroller” for my rotation unit.  During development I lifted the tank up and reversed it every 30 seconds, providing an alternation to the rotary processing.  I didn’t do this for the fixing step and I think that’s the cause for the fixing problem in this frame.  It’s unfortunate because it turned out to be a pretty good picture.  This is a VERY quick scan with practically zero retouching.  Almost straight out of the negative.

If you want to see why I’m getting so excited about this, have a look at this large sized image here.