www.lewiz.org

I foolishly bought a roll of 50ASA B&W film months and months ago… unsurprisingly, I never did manage to use it in the UK, but comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas was 30C average, I took it along with me, and ended up shooting it on our trip to the Grand Canyon.

For a 50ASA film it’s actually rather noisy; presumably because the emulsion is so old by comparison with the likes of Ilford HP5 (a 400 speed that has similar properties in terms of noise)... but I really quite like it.

I’d expected a very smooth, low contrast film, but that’s not really how it turned out… it’s nicely contrasty and while it has plenty of grain, it’s very small and adds to the film.

Here’s a Grand Canyon shots that I edited very quickly (8-bit in the GIMP)... click for a larger image:

So, last week I was in Las Vegas on business… I’d planned on holding back until I had some really great photos to include with a proper beefy blog entry.

I’ve just got my 12 rolls of film back from Peak, and I’m very upset to discover that every single frame that I took with the F100 I bought second-hand the day before I went away is out of focus. I was using Vlad’s Sigma 24-70 1:2.8 for most shots, but not all… I took a whole bunch with my 50mm 1:1.8 and a few with the 28mm 1:2.8, and these are also OOF.

I had originally planned to shoot a roll, take it to a one-hour processing place and see how they came out. I later didn’t bother, figuring that the chances of the metering not working, were very slim. I guess I was right, the metering was bang on… admittedly the scenes I was shooting were bright but fairly low in contrast.

Instead, it appears that the focal plane is misaligned in some way… serious bummer.

When scanning through 35mm frames all of the photos look great… but tbh, I was really hoping for some good shots this time. I knew I had a few killer ones from the Grand Canyon… the kind that I could put into a photo album for the future. No such luck.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so blase about it all…

The only positive is that all of the F3 shots (another six rolls) appear to be well in focus. I shot at some low shutter speeds for many of them, so a fair few will be lost to camera shake, but overall the exposure and focus look good.

Once I’ve scanned and sorted through, I’ll get some up.

UPDATE on a closer look, it seems that the film back does not have a pressure plate to hold the film flat… serious bummer.  I feel stupid for not realising until now, but then again, is it something you’d normally check?

This weekend I drove up North first to Manchester to hang out with Vlad, Samia, and Huseyin.  We had a nice meal out at Pizza Express in Prestwich, before heading to AMC in the centre to catch ‘Run Fat Boy, Run’.  Thandie Newton is damn gorgeous, which helps.

Saturday evening I drove the remaining 50 miles or so to Liverpool to join a few well-wishers see of my Uncle Quentin.  A very average meal was followed by a thirty minute drink in an impressive hall at our hotel.  Unfortunately everybody else had been up into the wee hours of the morning, which meant I was left stranded in my hotel room at 10PM with nothing to do.  For once I managed to remember my book; in this case Haruki Murakami’s ‘new’ novel, ‘After Dark’.

I’ve covered sixty or so pages of After Dark already, and it’s as good as ever.  What’s slightly odd is that this book is written entirely in the third person, which is very uncharacteristic for Murakami.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing.  While previously I’ve been a middle-aged man (probably just divorced (or soon to be)) who enjoys cats, pasta and jazz… this time I’m a fly-on-the-wall.  A very big change.

The hotel, the Adelphi Britannia, which is opposite Lime St station, reminds me terribly of the Dolphin Hotel from an earlier Murakami novel.  I half-expected a high-class prostitute to turn up… that or for a professional young receptionist with a tight blazer to take a fancy to me.  No such luck.

Up this morning for breakfast at 8AM, Quentin and Angie would have been at the clipper preparing for half an hour or more… hopefully sorting out the 30Kg of porridge that appears to have been loaded onto the boat!  What’s more impressive is that 30Kg isn’t for the full ten month trip, it’s just for the first leg; a mere four weeks!

Quentin is one of the relatively few people who is planning to do the full ten month stint… other people sign up for one or more legs, depending on how much time they can set aside from work, or indeed if they think that they can’t put up with four hour on-deck/in-bunk shifts and weekly showers for that long.

This afternoon the boats peeled off, did a quick turn around Albert dock and eventually headed out into the Mersey for more parading before the official race start at 3PM… Quentin’s clipper, ‘Hull and Humberside’, headed out into the sea in second place, just behind ‘Durban 2010 and Beyond’, which is surely a good start, but is by no means indicative of the final result.  According to Quentin, in one of the previous races three boats sailed across the leg finish line within 23 seconds of each other!

Not too much more to say about it for now… plenty more info to be found at www.clipperroundtheworld.com and I’ll upload some photos when I got my slides/negatives back from processing.

While pondering the purchase of a decent Paterson dev tank, light-proof bag and all of the other good stuff to allow me to dev my own TX400 and Neopan 1600 I figured I’d check on the costs of mail order dev.  Vlad pointed me at Peak Imaging who I’d always assumed would be out of my price range.

Peak cater to professional photographers and do B&W, C41, slide and probably all sorts of crazy types of film I don’t even know about.  From what Vlad has told me, Peak do some seriously impressive (and expensive) prints.  Much to my surprise Peak don’t charge serious cash for dev only.

Having heard only good things, I found an envelope, stuck in a roll of TX400, Neopan 1600 and some Fuji Superia 200 (or 400), along with my debit card details.  Sending is done via freepost, but they make a charge of £2.50 for return postage.

As I only put the package in the post box on Wednesday, I hadn’t planned to come home this evening to find my negatives on the door mat.  Very good turnaround, especially compared to Jessops, which requires a trip into town to drop them off, and a trip about two weeks later to collect (they have to send them away and they end up coming back eight days later, just too late for a weekend collection).

The sleeves Peak provide are better too, they cut into strips of six (exactly how many frames the film scanner I’m borrowing from Quentin handles) and there is no curling on any of the three different types of films.  Usually I get some gungy marks on my negatives with Jessops, this just isn’t true with Peak.

So… for £13.54 for three rolls of film, including despatch and a turnaround of three days.  I won’t be using Jessops again.

Vlad has an awesome blog post over at http://inomine.walktojapan.com/2007/06/25/i-like-flash/

I encourage you all to go and check it out. It was in response to a recent post of mine involving monitors ;)

I clearly need one of these bad boys.

I nipped into Camberley today to pick up a two rolls of film (yes, my life really is that exciting).

I bought a roll of 135 TX400 from Jessops, but they didn’t have any 120.  Next stop was S&P, a smaller shop just down the road.  These guys didn’t have what I wanted, either, but in the end I walked out with a roll of FP4 at a mere £4.50 (remember this is for a whopping 12 exposures).

This Hassie 500C was my Grandad’s camera, which my Uncle Quentin inherited (and I subsequently borrowed).  I spend quite a bit of time figuring out how it worked and generally getting all of the various bits and pieces going.   Unfortunately the 120 film back slips slightly near the end of the wind… this put me off using the body for quite some time.

But today, I decided I’d had enough waiting, and began the crazy process of getting a roll of film loaded on Camberley high street.  It took me a good five minutes to figure out all of the looping and winding that goes on, during which time some old timer wanders up and asks: “Is that a Bronica?”

This amused me quite a bit… I guess it’s an easy mistake to make when you’ve not seen one for a couple of decades, and you were never that familiar with them in the first place.

So, anyway, I got to replying and told him that it wasn’t a Bronica, but a Hasselblad.

“Oh, even better then.”

“Yup.”

...

“I just wish I could make the damn thing work.”

On Windows Vista I use EXT2-IFS to mount my home directory, which Windows does not natively support. As my home directory lives underneath the /home mountpoint, I accessed my files via N:\lewiz, as opposed to just N:\ if I were to mount via Samba.

While this all worked very well, I now wanted to use my Lightroom database in my Windows XP VMware image. No problem, I thought, I’d just import the database and all would be well.

As it turned out, Lightroom really didn’t seem to like this. All of my folders turned red, I couldn’t access the photos and Lightroom went off doing some checking stuff that really didn’t interest me.

I attempted to tell Lightroom where my root images directory was, but I didn’t have much luck. A little frustrated, I decided to open the database file in vim and do a global search and replace on the offchance. Upon opening the file, I spotted that the lrdb file used by Lightroom is actually a SQLite database.

Impressed, I did some poking and discovered that filename and path data really only exists in two tables: Adobe_imageFiles and AgFolderTagInfo.

As I had no Internet at the time, I had to call Vlad to find out what the SQLite string concatenation function was, but in no time at all I had four SQL queries that I applied to (a copy of) my database:

update Adobe_imageFiles set absolutePath = 'N:' || substr(absolutePath, 9, 9999999);

update Adobe_imageFiles set robustRepresentation = 'WN:' || substr(robustRepresentation, 10, 9999999);

update AgFolderTagInfo set absolutePath = 'N:' || substr(absolutePath, 9, 99999) where absolutePath like '<span>lewiz</span>';

update AgFolderTagInfo set robustRepresentation = 'WN:' || substr(robustRepresentation, 10, 99999);

Import the database into Lightroom, and Voila! My images all work.

That said, Lightroom does appear to be bitching about being unable to write metadata to the files.

This is probably a very stupid thing to do with your Lightroom database, I do not recommend that you try it. I expect that my database will fall apart shortly. In fact, I have this weird feeling that some Lightroom dev is going to pop along, read what I’ve done, and double over laughing at my stupidity.

Ah, well.

A couple of days ago I posted my favourite photo from the China holiday… ‘Silence on the mountain’

Vlad suggested ‘Thunder on the mountain’ and a bunch of word insertion was tried until I settled on silence.

Vlad did the work on this shot… my original version was good, but nowhere near the version that Vlad produced.

I duly uploaded it to TrekEarth, marking the first TE post I’ve done in months and, lo and behold, got some pretty impressive feedback.

Right now it is sat at 30 points, which is quite impressive.  A few of my other photos are ranked in the 50s, but it was really nice to get such a good response with the first photo in a while.

Hopefully I’ll get a few more shots sorted out and upload those too :)

I’ve spent most of the day messing around with photos in Lightroom.  I’ve uploaded all of the shots I’ve done today.  I’m pretty happy with most of them, although one or two do still need a little more work.

Please visit the gallery at www.fajita.org/china2007/ to have a look.  Sometime soon I’ll finish off the work I started on the Angkor gallery and make that public too.

Here’s one of my favourite shots from the China 2007 gallery: