I Can See it For You Wholesale

My normal mode of film buying is to pick up a few rolls at a time. This is partly because I’m a stingy bastard, even with my own hobbies, but mostly it’s because I haven’t really settled into a groove regarding what emulsions work well for me. I definitely love Portra 800, but shooting a steady diet of just that wouldn’t make a lot of economic sense.

I recently broke with this trend to pick up ten rolls each of Arista Premium 100 and Arista Premium 400. These are — by all reports — rebadged Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X. I need to shoot these films for the Laney photo classes, so they make sense in that regard. I also find myself really warming to Plus-X, now that I no longer suck so hard at shooting it.

I recently developed and scanned the first roll of Premium 100, and I got some shots — particularly with the 35mm f/1.4 AIS — with which I am extremely pleased. Maybe unreasonably so.

It’s a bit odd. One of — if not the — main things that initially appealed to me about film was the ability to shoot grainy images at high sensitivities and get usable results. For this reason, I expected Tri-X to immediately rock my world, but I find that the contrast of Plus-X has an immense appeal that Tri-X does not automatically provide. I really do need to start developing at home, because I know there are ways to get Tri-X to behave more like I want it to. : )

I woke up at 3AM this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I went through my morning ablutions, and pounded the “j” key through my feeds in google reader, and reviewed new posts to my flickr groups since I’d gone to bed. That left me with whole hours to kill before I could plausibly catch a bus to work.

This would have been a great time to have an all-night (or at least open early) eatery, but, bizarrely, there’s almost nothing in the way of food and caffeine in walking distance that opens until, like, 6:30AM. I live a block away from a gigantic university — where are these kids going at 4:00AM to satisfy their munches?

Well, whatever. I ignored my lack of food and caffeine and set about making some images. Then, when Peet’s finally opened at 6:30, I set about starting the editing process, while I still had the somewhat manic mindset. In my sleep-deprived state, I got pretty experimental, in two main areas — specular highlights (I don’t normally set out with them in mind) and a rejection of realistic white balance. Some of the results were quite interesting.

This is probably my favorite of the group. I like the symbolism, both of the cruciform/angelic inverted figure and also of the sulphur-yellow-and-scorched colors of the carport. I particularly like all of that when embodied in that most mundane of all vehicular storage areas.

This is the First Church of Christ, Scientist. It’s an awesome, wonderful building, that looks less like a Christian church than it does like Elrond’s townhouse. I’ve seldom had much luck photographing it, probably mostly because I have crappy instincts when it comes to architectural photography. This shot doesn’t highlight the bizarre design motifs of the building, but relies instead on light and shadow and leading lines — photographic fundamentals.

I don’t entirely know whether or not I like this image. It is a good example of an image dominated by specular highlights (something I’d been meaning to create on purpose, rather than by accident, following a thread in the D40/xD60 club group. And beyond that, it’s also an interesting image in terms of the positioning of the tip of the vine inside the specular highlight — a nifty effect, which makes for a surreal image that has a certain appeal. But it does not fall within what Minor White referred to as the “thin red line of uniqueness to the man,” meaning that it doesn’t seem like an image of mine.

This image, made after the sun had started attempting to rise through the mist and clouds, feel more like my own, although I could not tell you why. It was made through a fogged window toward part of a string of lights, which were not on, with other lights, which were on, in the background, contributing an oddly streaky set of specular highlights.

35mm f/1.4 AIS Before Dawn – a set on Flickr

A thing of beauty. My first non-non-AI manual lens. It will replace my 35mm f/2 O and 50mm f/1.4 S for regular carrying purposes, and will probably be the lens most often on my camera when I’m not looking for birds.

Rørslett says that this lens

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blockquote> Its imaging capacity quickly increases when the aperture is set to f/2.8 and peak performance is reached between f/4 and f/5.6. In this quite narrow range it produces tremendously sharp images. To illustrate its imaging potential: In the peak range it is possible to discern objects that actually measure <1 mm within a recorded area of 5 by 8 m. You’ll need at least 40X magnification to observe these tiny details on the film, but they certainly are there . This shows the unbelievable level of detail that can be resolved on film by this lens!

Which is one of the reasons I bought it — because my 35mm f/2 O, especially when shooting at f/2-f/2.8, is a bit soft, especially when thinking about film enlargement, rather than digital, where sharpening is simple and fast.

But while that’s part of the lens’s appeal and a big part of why I bought it, so far, I just haven’t been able to stop shooting at f/1.4. Sharpness, shmarpness, look at this:

And this:

Woo! Sharpness is overrated. Bokeh is where it’s at!

Of course, neither sharp focus nor soft focus nor great or little depth of field in and of themselves are enough to make a photograph worthwhile. But it’s good to have these tools when you need them, and this lens definitely expands my toolkit.

I’ll try to bust out the tripod and do some test shots comparing this lens with the 35mm f/2. I already tried this last night, but I had my tripod set up too close to a TV, and I wound up with crazy flare from the TV, affecting the 35mm f/2 considerably. I was able to determine (from some handheld tests that aren’t conclusive for sharpness) that the f/1.4 AIS is about 1/2-2/3 of a stop faster than the 35mm f/2 when shooting at f/2. This is doubtless attributable to the lack of multicoatings on the 35mm f/2.