Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/11/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]http://www.rabiner.cncoffice.com/pdfs/MuseumHalloween.pdf The above is a 1979k PDF which takes less then a minute to load if you have DSL i think. Hit the option button if you want it not to come up in your browser, but on your hard disk where your acrobat works a bit better. It consists of 15 4x5's very close to 1:1 neg-size on a 22x18in horizontal poster layout. The location is the Portland Art Museum North Wing Grand Ballroom lobby. I shot 4x5 Kodak T Max 400 which i ran in a Kodak half gallon rubber tank in Xtol 1:1 for ten minutes. Agitating once per minute as per usual. 70 degrees. 8 at a time. 4 runs. Fixed twice. 4 tanks. That's 32 images so i edited 17 out for perhaps the time being. I added 2 ounces of pure Xtol after every run to the tank. 8 sheets equals 2 rolls. Straight answers on replenishing Xtol with Xtol i could not get because they kept talking about seasoning in the Kodak literature. And I'm allergic to MSG! No i wasn't about to start "seasoning" this stuff where was i when they invented THAT? No one told me about it. My guess on 10 minutes turned out to be right on the money. My consistency in all four runs is remarkable. My contact sheets all certainly got the same time under my enlarger and matched up well. There is some brief nudity here. Some People wearing briefs - and not much else plus body paint. No boxers - "thongs." And paint. But they left a one inch bald spot at the base of their spinal cord so they wouldn't suffocate!!! Such A Cold Finger.......beckens You To Enter His Web Of Sin.......... So if the kids are standing right there next you your monitor as you download this blindfold them. Better yet gag 'em!!! And a few shots might even be a tad disturbing. Are you downloading yet? I took an ambient reading and got 5.6 at a 1/4 second! I had my Calumet/Cambo NX set up on my new Ries wooden tripod in the corner of the room. The lobby. No head! The camera was hot-wired right to the tripod. Do i have shifts or do i have shifts? Do i have legs which lock anywhere? The ballroom things were happening fast and the reading was 5.6 at at least a minute. It would have been an empty ballroom. A few very transparent Ghosts. No Pepe and the bottle blonds. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004UDE8/qid%3D1005731256/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/103-9844849-2939036 Like a civil war battlefield... an empty field. Oh and the lens was a Fujinon W 5.6 210 i got ten years ago from Calumet. Way before i got into German glass. I thought: These pictures are not going to come out! I don't have a clue what I'm doing in this format! These people are boring. What the hell am i doing here in this Nadar Peirott Photographer white clown outfit!? But as I've been all of a sudden shooting wide open with all my other cameras and lenses why not 4x5? Great bokeh maybe! Eh? The blur might be a big plus! Stop them from being deadly boring Maybe! A little bit out of focus; a little blur - what have you got? A transcendental experience! Mush! I focused my camera a foot from the corner. Some people came right over and stood there. They were not so boring. They wanted to know what they owed me. This happened all night. Where did they keep their wallets with those Costumes? I had special pockets sown into mine! I clicked the shutter having cocked it ahead of time. Stuck the dark slide back in. Said thank you. Flipped the thing around took the dark slide out and parked it at the top position just like the 1850's photo. Cocked the shutter and went looking for a spicy victim. Others found me. What do you say when a big white clown asks you to take your picture? I think most of them saw my big view camera parked out in the corner of the lobby. 4x5 is both impressive and unthreatening. People will give you the second degree with hand held small rollfilm cameras as you try to blend in. We photogs have a bad rap as of late. But the 4x5 on a wooden tripod breaks all that down. My instincts based on i don't know what came thru for me on these shots. They came out exactly as i thought they would. The blur and bokeh. I'm happy as a clam. I love Halloween because everyone dresses up as themselves! Their year round costumes finally come off! These are scans at 1200 dpi off the contact sheets. A full sheet at a time. I then divided them up into individual units. Eventually i may scan the negs if i want to inkjet them. But i may upload these to my website. But I'm going to darkroom print them 11x14 warts and all. My Omega D2 had no cloning tool. Must have not been in the shipping case. I'm seeing how I'm going to have to air blast and brush my negs better as i load them in the holders. This is day one for me. I've shot very little sheetfilm. And not in a decade. Each indiviual neg was 5 inches high. Around 6000 pixels high. Then downsampled to screen size, 768 pixels high-still 5 inches high and put in the layout in Adobe InDesign. The texture of the scratched contact sheet making glass really comes though if you zoom in with the magic magnifying glass in Adobe Acrobat! By the way my wifes Epson printer made a stupendous letter sized inkjet of this thing. The default for acrobat is "size to print." Very sharp! My wife punched holes in the contact sheets to put in the 3 ring binder with the negs! I forgot to tell her i was planning on scanning them! But i find those punch holes a real plus at this point with the pictures! How much would i have to pay an artistic consultant to put those holes in there so perfectly! Without the holes and glass scratches i have no ideal how much I'll still like these shots! We'll see. I cant wait to bring these back into the darkroom. and put them INTO the enlarger this time. Its been years since i've printed this large a neg. Mark Rabiner Portland, Oregon USA http://www.rabiner.cncoffice.com/ - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html