Stone I like your pictures and your scanner. The V750 does a really nice job. By the way my comment about my cheating by bracketing was a little bit of a joke about myself not taking me too seriously. I don't go out too often with my RB67 which is damn heavy. And I often only shoot one or two subjects while out on one roll of film. So anything that helps get me the right exposure to work with is just a lot less frustrating than coming home with too dark or too light.
.........What works one time, doesn't the next. Or vice versa.
................me too!
Alan, I have to agree with your comment. Although I love my Microtek i900 scanner and have no fault there, it's just the nature of my scans with Velvia 50 in both MF & LF. I use Silverfast and it's excellent as a scanning software IMO, I just find many times I do no corrections at all with it and drag the image into PS as an Adobe 98 RGB and do all the processing work after the scan.
The V700 (V750 is a US market model) is here beside me, relegated to scanning old prints for my book ('Rise of the Supergraft: Transplants without borders'). Since 2011 all scanning for my exhibition work from RVP images has been done in-lab by a drum-scanner and the results are superior but I did have several scans printed off 6x17 images two years back; these were "OK", but later drum scans showed how much better things are (scanning from supplied transparencies is built into the cost of exhibition-quality prints). There is not the time here to work on scans I'm out-there photographing, unloading, dropping film in, vetting quickly, mounting and back at lab for work (around 150km return travel, twice weekly), even though that work is restricted to print-profiling and colourimetrics (no corrections applied that I've specified in recent memory), proofing then finals.
The late Tasmanian photographer Peter Dombrovskis often took 14 double 4x5 holders with him on his far-reaching solo expeditions into the wilderness (initially using Ektachrome, then Velvia); of that number of holders, at least 8 holders were brackets his large format incident metering was very rudimentary and his complete archive (Peter Dombrovskis: National Library of Australia archive, 1960 to 1996) shows a large number of quite bad exposure errors (and surprisingly bad compositions), along with the many 'lucky strikes' the truly evocative, beautifully captured images, that made it into his still-sought after books and postcards. I don't think there are many people that would throw that much film out to brackets! Personally I would find it prohibitively expensive.
I can't seem to make silverfast 8 work for me, it never wants to scan, and if I can get it too, it never wants to let me adjust anything, I've given up trying to use it, the same could be said for PS, the darn thing is too complicated, so I just have to make good exposures to begin with...
But that's the way to do it regardless. You always want to work with a properly exposed shot. Trying to correct it afterwards, whether film or digital, often doesn't work. If it is exposed right, it usually makes everything else you do afterwards easier and the results come out best. What's the expression, you can't make silk purse from a sow's ear. In my case though, since I'm shooting cheaper roll film rather than LF, I figure "wasting" a couple of shots is better than coming home with nothing worth while.
This shot http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/11854936794/in/set-72157626597775701 taken when the sun was setting was a little dark. But good enough to get a good result. But I totally blew the correct exposure probably because I forgot to release the shutter after releasing the mirror. But I was able to get the second shot to work although exposed slightly darker. There was another set of three bracketed shots taken right afterwards with a different lens that were all dark. So I lost all three but was able to salvage that one shot of 6 that I posted. For me that's great. One out of 6 seems good to me and worth the "waste" of film. Maybe the lower cost is making me sloppy, don't know.
But I think it mainly has to do with being accurate in your initial exposure. Often, it's not that easy. The light at this time of the day changes very quickly. You have to compensate for filtering, reciprical failure with the slow Velvia, etc. So even if you think you got the correct initial exposure, you might not. If you're shooting in the middle of the day, exposure readings are more accurate and consistent. Also, they're not changing from one shot to the next as they do during magic hour, before sunset and after sunrise. I shot one set of pictures that just a couple of minutes later were too dark just a few minutes later. Hey, I use to bracket 5 shots, so I'm getting better. Well, maybe.
Interesting, well if I had the money maybe I would waste more film and bracket... Lol thanks for the share, makes me feel better that I don't, just because I would prefer to be accurate and purposeful in my work rather than throwing darts...
The filters I use when working with transparency film are a Polarizer (or Circular Polarizer), graduated neutral density, 81A, 81B, sometimes an 85, and some graduated color filters.
The most important thing is to get it right in camera. It's much more difficult or impossible to fix things later.
No, I've never tried any color adjustment filters for long exposure. The only slide film I've used for long exposure is E200 and that was for night shots. I thought the color shift was minor and looked all right.
Stone, where in CT are you? I live in Newtown.
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