image circles and cropping

the lens on a camera projects a circular image onto the film. to shoot with large format film one needs a lens with a large image circle - big enough to cover the film and more. my 8x10 shooting is very low budget. i have been using a 210mm rodenstock lens which has an image circle more suitable for 4x5 film to shoot 8x10. most of the time it covers it, but in this shot it didn't. the reason is i used a lot of front tilt in order to get the foreground and background in focus. this swung the film sheet out of the image circle - resulting in the radical vignette effect seen here.

sadly i did not notice this on the ground glass when i was setting up the picture, probably because there was so much wind i could barely hang onto my darkcloth.
 
the solution? for now, a drastic crop... which i think looks good anyway. in the long term though i need a lens designed for 8x10 film. until then i'll try to avoid large movements.

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see on flickr

incidentally this is a photo of an old bridge near the lemontree feedlot, north of millmerran, on the darling downs, queensland.

last of the batch

polaroid no longer manufactures it's large format instant films. in fact polaroid no longer manufactures any instant films. apparently they are still marketing some of their consumer films, such as pola 600, but they have engaged another company to make it.

thanks to my friend sam, i today obtained an unused and only slightly out of date pack of polaroid 56. this consists of 20 single 4x5 inch sheets of sepia film. one of the sheets is visible to the left of this shot, standing behind my old polaroid 545 film holder - which i had almost consigned to the museum shelf. this could be its last hurrah...

watch for some polaroid sepia images soon.

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suffering for art

my legs are aching from unaccustomed exercise but I console myself that I got this picture for my pains. sometimes we have to suffer for our art.

taken on a little cove in noosa national park after a 4 hour drive then a 6km walk over sand in hot humid conditions, carrying a heavy 4x5 camera and tripod. i want to go back with the 8x10… and maybe a welsh mountain pony.

on flickr

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It's like a Rubik's Cube, actually...

I've been doing a lot of reading up on those important photography things, like composition, lately.

I grabbed one book by a Japanese nature photographer that has a nice series of diagrams that show you everything you need to know to be as good as this Japanese nature photographer. Diagrams are an important aspect to everything here in Japan. Even the bidets have diagrams to help you on your way to cleanliness.

Anyway, the best English title I could come up with for this book was "Tanaka-san shows you how to stuff shapes into the Rulathird!!". And it does that very well. Not only telling you how to pick a nice mountain peak by it's triangularness, but also how to place it within your frame so it looks extra mountainy.

This shot was me giving the Rulathird a try. It's a bit difficult in film because most of the older film cameras don't hand the Rulathird to you like modern DSLRs. Heck, I think the Nikon DSLR viewfinder has the grid built in*.

You gotta eye it and hope for the best. I think it worked in this case.





*So I'm gonna call all of them "girly men".

at the door

i'd like to gain some portraiture skills. i would like to use natural light as much as possible - i have enough gear without carrying lighting equipment around too. still feeling my way with the new format, i tried a double challenge here - utilising the very narrow depth of field of the rodenstock 210/5.6 lens, and coping with very broad exposure latitude from light to shadow.

the focus was very critical. so much so that i kept having to refocus, even after i had inserted the film holder. a lot of patience needed - esp by the model. perhaps that's why the pose became a little wooden.

i am fairly happy with the result though. the light on helen's hair is barely adequate, but her face is well exposed, and the focus is confined to a very narrow field indeed. also the outside world is displaying some wonder bokeh. i need to work more on getting some ref;ected light in the foreground for this sort of shot though - i used a small reflector for this but it was not enough.

as for the knack for directing a model - i don't think i have that as yet... back to landscapes....

photo info -

camera = burke & james 8x10 inch view camera

lens = rodenstock apo-sironar 210mm 1:5.6

film - kodak t-max 100

exposure - ½sec at ƒ/45

processed in t-max developer

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