Another random shot while I wait for the weekend and time to catch up.

Hasselblad 500CM + Planar 80mm f/2.8 on Fujichrome Velvia 100

A follow up to The Resolution of Film. These are quick and dirty observations about film vs digital while I write a larger article on the topic.
This post is about the dynamic range of film – something film is famed for in photography.
Actually, I should be specific. It’s negative film, both black and white and colour, that has a highly regarded dynamic range – usually considered to surpass that of digital. For transparencies / slides (e.g. Velvia), this is actually the opposite as film of this type actually has a …

I wrote recently about the importance of selecting your best images from 2009 to give yourself a true reflection of your photography year. After much deliberation, here’s my top five images. Overall, I’m happy with where I ended up with these five. I think some are reasonably memorable and as is the case with my photography, consist of a range of topics –  from the familiar (Akuri and our dogs) to the somewhat bizarre. The year 2009 was supposed to be a time for me to return to “shooting for …

Happy New Year everyone.
OK this is the last in the series… Just a few shots of my little family as we made our way down the coast. As I’ve already said a dozen times, it was a wonderful four day trip and I intend to do it several times more over the next 12 months. I’m delighted with the shots I took over the week – only the second time I’ve ever felt strongly (i.e. brave enough) to bring only film equipment with me on a trip… I’ll never stop …

Today someone asked me to elaborate about my reference yesterday to the Canoscan’s 8800F “budget” characteristics … here’s a quick summary and a comparison with a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
As a very quick introduction, the Canoscan is a budget flatbed scanner from Canon. It has a high max DPI resolution and retails at the very low price of somewhere between $160 – $200. When I first got the scanner, I was amazed that it could support such a wide variety of film formats – from 35mm film to MF to regular …

OK, second part. This was the best part of the trip – the endless coastline with deserted beaches. Oregon allows dogs on their beaches so anytime we felt like stopping, we’d pull over, let the dogs out and start photographing. Other than the single trip down to Cannon Beach this summer (when the sea was relatively calm), I’ve never really had the chance to photography the ocean so this was a treat for me. At the beginning of the trip, the weather started in a howling rage but within a …

I’ll be uploading my pictures from our Oregon trip last week in four or five parts. Here is the first part in the series – “Skies”.
These are basically shots of the amazing stormy skies that tracked us as we headed down south on our trip. This subject matter has not been a classical area of strength for me so it was fun to actually get a chance to shoot some of those vast open skies.
I’ll post the rest of the images in coming days.

Olympus OM-4 on Fujichrome Velvia 100

Olympus OM-4 …

These are shots from last week, following up from my post containing images from that same morning. I must have been feeling particularly trigger happy that day because a roll of Velvia will normally last me a full weekend. I’m still somewhat new to Velvia and getting used to how it renders colours and deals with dynamic range (especially when compared to negative films). I do love it though and it’s always a hard decision for me whether to load up a roll of Ektar or this. Anyway, here are …

This was the last shot off a roll of Velvia I had in my camera. We were driving through Seattle and we saw this scene. It looked so fun I had to turn turn around at the next junction, park the car and walk over. He was sitting there so intently, he never even noticed me get up close. I’m just pleased I ended up having one shot left.

Olympus OM-4 + Olympus OM Zuiko 21mm f/2, Fuji Velvia 100

Just got a roll of Velvia 100 back from the lab. The shots were from Saturday morning onwards when the temperature was a freezing 26 degrees Fahrenheit (about -3c) here in Seattle. I love Velvia… the way it saturates the hell out of everything, the challenge of getting the exposure right, even the way it just looks so cool to be able to hold the slide up to the light to check before scanning.
These are a couple when we trekked out under the cover of darkness to see how …