Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Sun, 08 May 2011
Annex's latest show continues to be a photographic inspiration for me. In addition to all the photos I'm normally interested in taking for a show, I found myself with a desire to also take 5x7 photos of the cast.
If you've been following for a few years, you probably already know about my great-grandfather's 5x7 camera, which was also used by my grandfather Francis. Francis and my grandmother Ruth were avid photographers, and even now I have boxes and boxes of their slides in my basement.
Anyway, I don't find myself inspired to pull out the 5x7 very often, so it seemed worth pursuing. I tried a week or two ago, when I was also there to take production photos (photos-of-record that designers can add to their portfolios), but we ran out of time. The 5x7 camera has many fine attributes, but "speedy" is not one of them.
So we tried again last night, and I made the group photo my only priority. It worked well, although even with the nearly 45 minutes I gave myself to set up and take the photos, I was still feverishly putting things away as the audience was filing in to see the show (we took the photos before the show started, since everyone just wants to get out of costume once it's over).
I decided that I wanted to try making these photos with a strobe, something I'd never even considered before with the 5x7. The new lens and shutter is capable of it, though, so again I figured it was worth pursuing. The only strobe I own is the battery-operated Canon 580exII I got for my SLR, but I have an umbrella and stand for it, so I set them up. I was also clever enough to get a flash-capable version when I bought my spot meter last year, so I was able to meter the shot with reasonable accuracy.
I made up a kit of stuff to take with me on any 5x7 shoot, and among my kit is a pair of grey cards (18% grey, which is what the spot meter expects to find when checking exposure), in addition to the spot meter and some other stuff. I was glad to have it for this shoot, as my attempts to meter on "highlights" were not terribly accurate, and the end-result of metering on the grey card was quite good.
For the shoot itself, I ended up going with the strobe shooting through the umbrella (now very glad I got a white one instead of a silver one), as bouncing off the umbrella didn't get enough photons on the scene. I also left the theatrical lights up to reinforce the strobe -- strobe alone resulted in something like an f/2 aperture requirement, and my lens only goes down to f/5.6. Even there, it's likely to be pretty soft, so you really want to go up to f/11 or f/16 if at all possible.
I was also situated close enough to the group that depth of field would be a real problem (indeed it was -- Martyn and James in the back of the group are out of focus, although not badly so). The meter said I could get away with 10% of a stop above f/11, so that's where I set the camera. I was using 1/60th of a second, as long as I was shooting with the flash. I might have been able to stop down more and go for a longer exposure, but I was worried it would look weird with the strobe and strengthened theatrical lights (the longer exposure would only capture more of the theatrical lights, changing the lighting balance).
I could have conceivably tilted the film carrier top-to-bottom in order to incline the field of focus, but I was already running short on time. I was pretty sure that anything other than a straight 90° setup in the camera wouldn't work. That's a trick I might try pulling out some other time, when I have a bit more leisure for setting up the shot.
Development was pretty straightforward, although I ended up developing one shot (of the four I took) all by itself, and the rest all together, along with two other shots I've been waiting to develop. 5 pieces of film in the tray at once was almost certainly too much, and several of the negatives have scratches and odd missing spots that I'm pretty sure are attributable to having so much film together at once. I think if I have a choice in the future, I'll just develop one at a time to avoid the problem. I'm pretty sure when I review my books on the subject, they'll say something like, "If you need to tray-develop more than one sheet of film at a time, limit yourself to 3."
I finally got myself a small light-box, so I was able to copy one of the negatives easily, although the 18 MP photo reproduced below (click on the web-size one for the full-size version) is a tiny fraction of the information available in the negative. One site I was reading suggests that a 5x7 negative contains about 400 MB of 16-bit black and white data. If I pursue the Epson V700 scanner I was looking at (with a 6400 dpi scan resolution), a 5x7 negative will produce a 1433.6 MP image, or about a 2.7 GB file at 16 bits per pixel. The website I mentioned above, Ken Lee Gallery, was reckoning with a 2400 dpi scan resolution.
That's a lotta bits. (For reference, the full-size image below is a 1.2 MB file. Granted, it's a JPEG, and therefore compressed, but still. It's orders of magnitude smaller.)
Anyway, enough jabbering. Here's the shot.
Jillian Vashro, James James, Truman Buffett, Mary Murfin Bayley (seated), Martyn G. Krouse, Danielle Daggerty
This shot shows one very distinct artifact of being processed in a batch -- there's a vertical stripe that runs the entire height of the left side of the photo, past Jillian's shoulder, around the middle of the signpost picture. If you click on the bigger picture, you can also see some dust and detritus that I didn't clean off, and that's not all of it: this picture has already received the loving ministrations of Photoshop's healing brush to deal with some specks of dust, as well as specks of missing emulsion. I need to go through the four I took and find the one that was processed individually. Hopefully it escaped with less damage.
Posted at 12:12 permanent link category: /photography
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater