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compilerbitch goes to Yosemite
Aug. 13th, 2006 02:04 amcompilerbitchI'm in a motel room just south of Yosemite, after a long afternoon of photography.
Yosemite is truly spectacular -- I can really see what people see in the place now, having visited it. I am very lucky to live within half a day's drive of the park, and I seriously doubt that this will be my last visit!
We arrived quite late, it being a long way from Mountain View and all. I ended up setting up at two locations, spending about 2-3 hours at the first one and half an hour at the second one. I'm getting quicker with the large format camera, but I'm finding that the best results come from *not* rushing it. It takes about 20 minutes to set up from scratch, including setting up the tripod, opening the two flight cases, setting up the laptop and scanning back, attaching the view camera to the tripod, zeroing all the movements (both standards have four degrees of freedom, so you have to set them all parallel and in sensible positions before you start), and levelling everything with a spirit level. Then I decide on the shot I want, put one of the four different focal length lenses on it (these were all shot with a 150mm Nikkor-W), focus, adjust the camera movements so I get exactly what I want, check the focus again, lock everything down tightly, stop the lens down to somewhere between f11 and f32, put one or other of the infrared filters in the compendium shade and attach it in front of the lens, put the digital back in, do a quick test scan, check the focus yet again (the back has a facility for this which works extremely well), set the exposure, do another test scan just to be sure, then make the final scan -- so far, we're at about 35-40 minutes, not including however long the scan takes.
An afternoon of photography got me 15 exposures, a few of which were just duplicates I made as a second scan just in case something had gone wrong with the first one (if it takes so long to set up the shot, it would be stupid to lose it all by being careless at the end). I generally made two colour exposures (which I later often convert to black & white) and one or two infrared exposures at each setup, of which I think I did about four. Anyway, here are the 4 photos that I've sorted out for printing so far (I have about another 3 or maybe 4 from today's shooting that still need doing).
Bear in mind that these are 640x480 reductions -- the original images are all 8000x6000. Printed bigger than A4, this works out as so sharp that the resolution of the print exceeds the resolution of my eyes. I can't wait to get back home and print them. The visual impact of this kind of print is hard to explain, and impossible to demonstrate without actually viewing a physical print. I had hoped that the BetterLight system would make it possible for me to get to the level of image quality I'd always aspired to but never quite attained -- in practice, it has done that so well that it really is out of the other side.
Tomorrow, we're off to Mono Lake, via Yosemite again. I want to try to get a better vantage point to shoot Half Dome (you can see it in the far distance on the distant monochrome shot), and Caroline wants to go to the visitors centre and (both of us) want to visit the Ansel Adams gallery. We attempted that today, but the sheer number of visitors made it impossible to get anywhere near it -- parking was virtually impossible, so we decided to go and take photos instead. If I'm not too dead tomorrow night, I'll upload a few more from tomorrow's shooting.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the photos:
El Capitain in Colour
El Capitain in Monochrome
El Capitain in Infrared
El Capitain and Half Dome in Monochrome
Yosemite is truly spectacular -- I can really see what people see in the place now, having visited it. I am very lucky to live within half a day's drive of the park, and I seriously doubt that this will be my last visit!
We arrived quite late, it being a long way from Mountain View and all. I ended up setting up at two locations, spending about 2-3 hours at the first one and half an hour at the second one. I'm getting quicker with the large format camera, but I'm finding that the best results come from *not* rushing it. It takes about 20 minutes to set up from scratch, including setting up the tripod, opening the two flight cases, setting up the laptop and scanning back, attaching the view camera to the tripod, zeroing all the movements (both standards have four degrees of freedom, so you have to set them all parallel and in sensible positions before you start), and levelling everything with a spirit level. Then I decide on the shot I want, put one of the four different focal length lenses on it (these were all shot with a 150mm Nikkor-W), focus, adjust the camera movements so I get exactly what I want, check the focus again, lock everything down tightly, stop the lens down to somewhere between f11 and f32, put one or other of the infrared filters in the compendium shade and attach it in front of the lens, put the digital back in, do a quick test scan, check the focus yet again (the back has a facility for this which works extremely well), set the exposure, do another test scan just to be sure, then make the final scan -- so far, we're at about 35-40 minutes, not including however long the scan takes.
An afternoon of photography got me 15 exposures, a few of which were just duplicates I made as a second scan just in case something had gone wrong with the first one (if it takes so long to set up the shot, it would be stupid to lose it all by being careless at the end). I generally made two colour exposures (which I later often convert to black & white) and one or two infrared exposures at each setup, of which I think I did about four. Anyway, here are the 4 photos that I've sorted out for printing so far (I have about another 3 or maybe 4 from today's shooting that still need doing).
Bear in mind that these are 640x480 reductions -- the original images are all 8000x6000. Printed bigger than A4, this works out as so sharp that the resolution of the print exceeds the resolution of my eyes. I can't wait to get back home and print them. The visual impact of this kind of print is hard to explain, and impossible to demonstrate without actually viewing a physical print. I had hoped that the BetterLight system would make it possible for me to get to the level of image quality I'd always aspired to but never quite attained -- in practice, it has done that so well that it really is out of the other side.
Tomorrow, we're off to Mono Lake, via Yosemite again. I want to try to get a better vantage point to shoot Half Dome (you can see it in the far distance on the distant monochrome shot), and Caroline wants to go to the visitors centre and (both of us) want to visit the Ansel Adams gallery. We attempted that today, but the sheer number of visitors made it impossible to get anywhere near it -- parking was virtually impossible, so we decided to go and take photos instead. If I'm not too dead tomorrow night, I'll upload a few more from tomorrow's shooting.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the photos:
El Capitain in Colour
El Capitain in Monochrome
El Capitain in Infrared
El Capitain and Half Dome in Monochrome
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-13 10:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-15 04:52 pm (UTC)This was basically my second outing with the large format rig, and after the not very impressive attempt the previous week, it was nice this time to get a few good images out of it. It's still a learning process, though -- some things are relatively easy, but others can be quite difficult, particularly focussing, especially if you're using a back tilt. I don't have the image files to hand (I'll probably post them tonight), but I tried some back tilts on Sunday to get a flat meadow with mountains in the background all in focus. I found that the ground wasn't flat enough! On one, the grass near my feet, and the mountain peak, was pin sharp (I mean, *really* pin sharp, to the extent of having a bit of aliasing! That 90mm Super Angulon is a staggeringly good piece of glass), but the far side of the meadow and the foot of the mountain looked a bit soft. In another attempt, I had the whole meadow incredibly sharp, but the mountain was a bit too soft. I think for scenes like that I need to take two shots -- one with no tilt with the mountain all perfect, and another with tilt to get the foreground right, then stitch the two together in Photoshop. With film, I could stop down to f64 and forget about the problem, but the digital back likes more light than that.
Still, it's all a learning experience, and loads of fun. Handling a view camera is definitely nontrivial, very easy to get wrong, but the results are stunning when it all works (in those rare occasions when I don't screw up!) :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-15 05:12 pm (UTC)I wanted to ask you what you think about Olivo Barbieri, the guy who takes the amazing 'model world' photos, and his tilt-shift lens. Do you know what it is and can you do that with your kit?
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1760
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-15 05:21 pm (UTC)With a lens or camera that support tilts, getting things *out of focus* is kind-of the default! I think his trick is that he places parts of the image past the infinity focus point of the lens -- this looks exactly like a depth of field blur, but of course, if you focus past infinity, everything is out of focus regardless of distance. Any view camera can do this, and I'd suspect that most tilt lenses will be able to manage it too.