Hello APUG! I'm Jim Richards...musician, photographer, and pretty nice guy. Education as Electrical Engineer, most of my career as recording engineer, and now a happily married guy, working in corporate America running a great partnership team for a major credit card processor.
I've recently set aside my Canon 5D (except for use as a meter, and for now as a "scanner" to digitize my developed film!) and have started working with both 35mm and 645 formats, developing in my bathroom and having a ton of fun doing it. I've been taking photography seriously for about 6 years now, and you can see some of my work (mostly digital for now) on my flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyklane/
I've been a musician (piano/keys & drums/percussion) all of my life, and was a professional recording engineer for about 13 years...and the parallel between recording and photography has struck me deeply. For years I used software instruments (called VSTs or Plugins) along with a few select pieces of digital hardware, and made a move towards analog synthesizers and acoustic instruments several years ago. The detail, depth of tone, ease of use, and pure unadulterated fun of programming an old Minimoog or Prophet...or a new Moog or Prophet for that matter...is striking, and I found that both my compositions and enjoyment increased immensely. I found that by combining the perfect capture and reproduction of a high resolution digital recording system with proper analog instruments I really got the very best of both worlds...
To bring this back to photography, when I developed my first roll of HP5+ (HC-110 @ 68 degrees, dilution B) 120 film (shot with Mamiya 645 ProII) and saw the results on a light table and lupe, I was floored! Seeing what I've shot (even as a negative, have not yet had the pleasure of transparencies) as a physical thing...a real-world product that I can touch and enlarge (without interpolation!) and contact print...That little piece of red glass (Red 25A filter) I used on the lens looked SO MUCH more realistic and tactile as compared to what I'd been doing before: shifting the balance between digital R-G-B channels of a digital camera. I also shoot 35mm on my late Nana's Ricoh TLS-401, and have a lot of fun walking around Chicago (where I work now) finding street scenes and urban landscapes, decayed alleys, and even cliche portraits of homeless folks in exchange for a few bucks...all of it seems like so much more fun now that I'm shooting film.
Some things I'd love to continue to learn from the aggregated expertise and experience here at APUG are:
Advanced Film Development-----currently I'm pretty much following the directions given by Ilford and/or the Massive Dev Chart
Enlarging/Contact Printing----I've never printed optically, and would like to start with 120 contact prints
Digitizing Negatives----Currently, I use a 1:1 50mm macro lens on my Canon EOS 5D to fill the frame exactly with 35mm negatives, and for 120 roll-film I'm shifting the film and stitching together around 6 images to end up with a fairly large, high resolution file. I'm building a rig to make this process easier than it is currently. I've had my 35mm negatives scanned with a V750/VueScan combo, and found them lacking compared to what I get with my camera....I'd be happy to learn more on this.
There are a bunch of other topics I'm interested in as well, many having to do with pushing the limits of the medium in interesting ways... I've read many excerpts from APUG over the past few years, and I'm excited to be a member of what strikes me as an awesome community!
I've recently set aside my Canon 5D (except for use as a meter, and for now as a "scanner" to digitize my developed film!) and have started working with both 35mm and 645 formats, developing in my bathroom and having a ton of fun doing it. I've been taking photography seriously for about 6 years now, and you can see some of my work (mostly digital for now) on my flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyklane/
I've been a musician (piano/keys & drums/percussion) all of my life, and was a professional recording engineer for about 13 years...and the parallel between recording and photography has struck me deeply. For years I used software instruments (called VSTs or Plugins) along with a few select pieces of digital hardware, and made a move towards analog synthesizers and acoustic instruments several years ago. The detail, depth of tone, ease of use, and pure unadulterated fun of programming an old Minimoog or Prophet...or a new Moog or Prophet for that matter...is striking, and I found that both my compositions and enjoyment increased immensely. I found that by combining the perfect capture and reproduction of a high resolution digital recording system with proper analog instruments I really got the very best of both worlds...
To bring this back to photography, when I developed my first roll of HP5+ (HC-110 @ 68 degrees, dilution B) 120 film (shot with Mamiya 645 ProII) and saw the results on a light table and lupe, I was floored! Seeing what I've shot (even as a negative, have not yet had the pleasure of transparencies) as a physical thing...a real-world product that I can touch and enlarge (without interpolation!) and contact print...That little piece of red glass (Red 25A filter) I used on the lens looked SO MUCH more realistic and tactile as compared to what I'd been doing before: shifting the balance between digital R-G-B channels of a digital camera. I also shoot 35mm on my late Nana's Ricoh TLS-401, and have a lot of fun walking around Chicago (where I work now) finding street scenes and urban landscapes, decayed alleys, and even cliche portraits of homeless folks in exchange for a few bucks...all of it seems like so much more fun now that I'm shooting film.
Some things I'd love to continue to learn from the aggregated expertise and experience here at APUG are:
Advanced Film Development-----currently I'm pretty much following the directions given by Ilford and/or the Massive Dev Chart
Enlarging/Contact Printing----I've never printed optically, and would like to start with 120 contact prints
Digitizing Negatives----Currently, I use a 1:1 50mm macro lens on my Canon EOS 5D to fill the frame exactly with 35mm negatives, and for 120 roll-film I'm shifting the film and stitching together around 6 images to end up with a fairly large, high resolution file. I'm building a rig to make this process easier than it is currently. I've had my 35mm negatives scanned with a V750/VueScan combo, and found them lacking compared to what I get with my camera....I'd be happy to learn more on this.
There are a bunch of other topics I'm interested in as well, many having to do with pushing the limits of the medium in interesting ways... I've read many excerpts from APUG over the past few years, and I'm excited to be a member of what strikes me as an awesome community!
