I have long used SLRs, and still own my most recent film SLR - a Pentax K-1000. My current camera is a Pentax K-70, purchased in 2018, with three prime lenses and two zooms. Two of my photographic interests are color photographs of old water-powered mills and covered bridges. The third interest is an outgrowth of my decades of genealogical research, and that is photographing old gravestones. Classic scholarly photographs of gravestones began with plate cameras in the late 1800s, and today are still monochrome, which displays important details of inscriptions and decorations much better than color. Scholarly gravestone photographs are taken when the sun is illuminating the face of the stone at a 20 to 30 degree angle to provide the best details.
Some of the techniques which I use with my K-70 are derived from my decades of film SLR photography. One is the use of a variety of colored filters to affect the way colors are rendered in monochrome. For example, if a stone is rendered as a fairly light gray I want it to contrast with the (generally green plants) background, so I use a red or orange filter to darken the chlorophyll. If a stone renders as a darker gray I may use a green filter to lighten the background.
Selecting the best filter to use for a monochrome filter is done with my "Filter Flip Book," which contains selections from a large sample book of theatrical lighting gels carefully selected to match the color characteristics of each of my filter.. Each gel selection is mounted in a frame labeled with the gel number and the corresponding filter number. The frames are loose-leafed together. Although theatrical gels are not good enough to be used in front of a lens for photographs, they are good enough to quickly select from multiple filters, and the flip book makes the process a lot faster than trying multiple screw-on filters on the lens.
Some of you will say "Just shoot color and do the filtering in post." I have two reasons why I don't do that:
1) I want to capture the correct image in-camera. In my film SLR days I would try on all of the filters that I thought might work, and bracket all the shots. That was relatively cheap to do because I bought Tri-X and Plus-X in bulk, and loaded my own cartridges. I had a very well-equipped darkroom, so I developed my own film, made contact sheets to select the optimum image, printed it with my Super Omega enlarger, and developed and dried it.
2) Because of my filter flip book and automatic bracketing I can get the correct image in-camera faster than trying to do color filtering in post.
Dale H. Cook, Pentax K-70, Pentax DA 35mm, Pentax-D FA Macro 100mm, Pentax DA 18-270mm; Mamiya/Sekor 400mm; Rokinon 650Z 650-1300mm
Some of the techniques which I use with my K-70 are derived from my decades of film SLR photography. One is the use of a variety of colored filters to affect the way colors are rendered in monochrome. For example, if a stone is rendered as a fairly light gray I want it to contrast with the (generally green plants) background, so I use a red or orange filter to darken the chlorophyll. If a stone renders as a darker gray I may use a green filter to lighten the background.
Selecting the best filter to use for a monochrome filter is done with my "Filter Flip Book," which contains selections from a large sample book of theatrical lighting gels carefully selected to match the color characteristics of each of my filter.. Each gel selection is mounted in a frame labeled with the gel number and the corresponding filter number. The frames are loose-leafed together. Although theatrical gels are not good enough to be used in front of a lens for photographs, they are good enough to quickly select from multiple filters, and the flip book makes the process a lot faster than trying multiple screw-on filters on the lens.
Some of you will say "Just shoot color and do the filtering in post." I have two reasons why I don't do that:
1) I want to capture the correct image in-camera. In my film SLR days I would try on all of the filters that I thought might work, and bracket all the shots. That was relatively cheap to do because I bought Tri-X and Plus-X in bulk, and loaded my own cartridges. I had a very well-equipped darkroom, so I developed my own film, made contact sheets to select the optimum image, printed it with my Super Omega enlarger, and developed and dried it.
2) Because of my filter flip book and automatic bracketing I can get the correct image in-camera faster than trying to do color filtering in post.
Dale H. Cook, Pentax K-70, Pentax DA 35mm, Pentax-D FA Macro 100mm, Pentax DA 18-270mm; Mamiya/Sekor 400mm; Rokinon 650Z 650-1300mm
