My Dinosaur "Mailbox"

These photographs are taken by my ancient Kodak EasyShare Z7590 @ ISO 80. Sigh, the quality sucks, it makes me wish I still had my 400D with me. Ah wells, I'm going to buy a 30D at the end of the year after I've got cash from working.

These are the photographs of my mega mailbox camera (:

Better than your DSLR LCD

Whoops... table's leg is out of focus. Lol

Random shot of the rattan chair I'm on right now... oh the moire. Hah

That's all. (: Well to the Kodak's credit, it was an ancient camera which doesn't enjoy a place in my puny 30L Dry Cab. It has got fungi streaks all over the lens. Lol

Medium format - My new love

My 2nd roll of film through the RZ67. You can consider it the first, since the original first roll was screwed when 2 shopkeepers opened the film back hinge. Hahas, ah wells, I don't blame theme. This is a 'rare' camera in Singapore. Enjoy. [these are made on a flatbed document scanner. Meant for showing the composition only. Please don't flame me about uploading crap quality work :P]




My 2 beautiful maids. Maria and Marie. Hahahas, kidding. Two of my best friends ever, Nat and Carmen. (: Cheeky Nat and pretty Carmen. Lol

Freshly reprocessed in Picasa 2 and GIMP.
I'm really glad with the exposures. These four were exposed with my guesstimate-eye-lightmeter. They're all "well" exposed as far as my scanner can scan. Out of the 2 rolls, only one exposure was really off. (: I'm in love with MF. Heh

If you're wondering why the contrast of the 1st two, it's cause' I'm scanning with a flatbed DOCUMENT scanner, using ambient light as backlighting. I scanned the bottom one first, while the sun was brighter. It's dusk now which is why the lighting varied so much. So yep, the negatives look good, it's the lack of light for the scanner to do a good scan with high contrast. Yep

Musings

Alright, I don't usually do word posts here, but who cares - "I built this place, in here, I make the rules" loose quote from the Train Man in the Matrix.

Yea so I feel like I've posted too much on my other blog so here I'm rambling again. I was reading a post from photo.net when I saw some really funny descriptions of my "new" camera's sister models .

"I sort of treat my 645 as a walking around camera and the RB as a tripod mounted camera. Both are built strong enough to use to crack walnuts and they are cheap enough today to make one salivate. Jim M."

"is the RB67 really that heavy? The body of my kiev alone weighs 2.2 kilos :-/ at least it can be used as a weapon if need be"

"I must say that the RB 67 is the size of a mailbox."

". So, while it isn't quite a boat anchor I think if I held onto it, the tornado wouldn't be able to carry me off to Kansas."

hahas (: Alrights... it's kinda getting really late. I better go. Hold on to your guts though, I just finished my 2nd roll of 120 HP5+. I'll develop it in the darkroom with my sis on Sunday. I'll upload simple scans by Sunday night I think. Do expect alot of blurry images and off exposure images though. Thus far I've been using rather slow shutter speeds hand held and with the Sunny 16 + self-adapted guesstimated exposures. I'm too poor to buy a light meter, too lazy to lug an EOS 33 with tripod when I'm already carrying the "mailbox".

Bye

Scans

My scanner is currently my favourite imaging device. It gives me digital convenience while giving me rather exotic images that I like. It's very abstract due to the inherently 2d image. I never know what comes out of the scanner and post processing, it makes it really fun. (:

My 2nd sis's piggy bank on Superia 800 film. The emulsion is too dense I can't get the colour out onto the scanner. Heh, well, sepia works for me.

Colour inversion helps me get the "correct" colour on the film emulsion. It makes the image funky and cool though. I've only tried this recently cause' I used to crop frames out before inverting the colours.

I tried to do a "open-top" scan which I use to scan my film in the morning. This was taken at night thus the blackness of it all. This one isn't colour inverted. Well, the room was bright with lights as far as my eyes could tell. Now we see how incredible our eyes are at compensating brightness level. Well... I found a method to negate this compensating mechnism. I can accurately call the exposure of a scene within 1/2 EV step - so far. hehe, I'm a living light meter. This scan looks like a good mystery to me.

Mmm, my favourite. Love the dramatic effect on the narrow road the scan has given. I used a pen light to brighten up this scan at the film area.

Mm, new projects coming up would be film stressing. Yes, literally stressing the film out. Well, that might take till Nov 14 before commencement. hehe. Do check in once in awhile for unplanned updates like this though.

Superia 800

Musing... an attempt to free the little character on the right most frame (: Artsy huh?

An experiment I'm glad I made. I like the effects on print, much better than this scanned version

I know this is quite a crappy shot, but I don't expect myself to run up to the guy's ass with my 24mm lens just to capture this interesting moment between the girl and her dad (:

Remake of the black and white version. Obviously better exposure cause' there isn't awkward lighting in broad daylight

An attempt to mimic the style of the photograph above. Didn't work out all that well. This one's junction's wider. A 35mm might do better than a 24mm here. Light's too bright. I think I set it to f16 + CPL and I can't get sufficient blurring from the traffic.

This one's my fault. I failed to recognise the overly bright sky above. The walls are severely underexposed, which explains the noise.

Couldn't quite get the effect I wanted. Maybe a little artificial vignetting might help. Then again the caution sign's already about 2 stops under exposed. Should have filled flash, which I don't have, or just pointed the camera higher for a silhouette

Hill Street cat. This's the funny faced fella I didn't catch the first time I saw them. She's all grown up now. Still as scared of me as ever. Cute little girl, I'd have petted her on her head if she didn't keep running away.See the interesting clouds? I was so surprised to see them through my viewfinder. They were almost invisible to the naked eye. This is how the pros get the really interesting cloud effects. They use ND filters to draw out the clouds. For the same effect, just look out of your window. You'd realise that you can see details through the window pane you can't see if you just looked straight at the sky. Hmm, the effect isn't that great on this photo cause' I'm a poor bloke without a ND filter. I used a CPL and twisted it to give this. I might get a 3stop ND filter just to do this... ahh the possibilities

My favourite of the lot. Why? Cause' it's almost black and white, I had to focus on composition and form. The colours the Superia gives is just bleh. Then again, it's actually up to the labs to interpret the colours... that's a finicky technical question I don't wish to discuss on my blog. Well, I still dislike colour negatives anyway. I bumped up the saturation and increased the warmth for the Dr Ng Eng Hen's photo... his face turned orange before the other colours got close, CLOSE, to the correct hue and saturation.

Conclusion:
Colour negatives are really disappointing. I'm not wasting money buying any new stock. I'm on my last roll of Superia 200 which might be screwed up for all I know, cause' I re-rolled it into another film can after I screwed up the original one. I'm going full black and white now. When I feel rich enough I'll experiment with slide films. I have a roll of Velvia 100 in the freezer now. I haven't got the patience to go shooting one whole day with it. I might be getting a Canon 30D soon instead of a Mamiya 645 pro. The Mamiya seller is kinda... missing.

Oh yea, I forgot to mention. There's this pretty Caucasian babe who looked at me for a tad too long and I just gave her a funny look. Damn it, babes notice GWC [guys with camera]. I must develop a suitable response next time I go out shooting. Lol :D

Yeps, I better be gone. Bye all. 1 more month and you'll probably see 1 update per day - provided that I got myself a DSLR/compact.

-ramblings that might offend people. If you're easily offended and you own a DSLR, do not read!-


On a side note, there're just too many noobs-with-camera nowadays. I must have seen 2 dozen people with DSLR within half an hour on my last shooting trip. Why do I call them noobs? Well I'm a snob for one, 2nd they run their face into a flat panel and use the onboard flash. Goodness sake, I can't imagine the flare and "vignetting" he's gonna get. That's just one example. I'm sure out of the 2 dozen, at least 7 are decent and probably a hand full of pros. But the sheer number of people running around with big cameras is just shocking. This is what you get when the big companies go bananas with their adverts and price slashes on the DSLRs... Any budding pro-photographer-wannabe, you better distinguish yourself with either 1)film 2) medium format. If the above 2 fails, go get yourself a compact camera. Nope, I'm not joking with the compact. If you need evidence that compacts can get good photo, visit my teacher's flickr and check out his macro shots. [Mind you, he's a geography teacher, not a photography teacher, I have none] Then again, check out the flickr's group of phone camera photographers. Their photos are all better than mine, a snob who trots around with a big SLR.