I updated the ProPhoto blog theme this morning and I find myself without photoshop temporarily to edit the header image. I could just deactivate the theme for a few days till I get home. But thats no fun….
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So I really love shooting with the 4×5, but since I’m just getting it all figured out, my negatives are at best….lets say ‘Lacking’. Lacking contrast, lacking sharpness , lacking composition. The last one, Composition, I know is going to be the hardest one to overcome, there is not a lot of technical, just do this, info for lack of good composition skills….I know this and so I’m not too worried about it yet. I try to get things looking well framed, but the other two items are still immature technical details in my very technical brain, so once those become common practice I’ll work on ‘seeing’ correctly..It will be my most challenging task I do believe. I guess I should get to the point of the headline of this post, ‘toning’. If you look through Lenswork you’ll see some amazing work, and I truly believe that it’s the toning that really sets it off for me. From day one, the first negative I scanned, I tried to tone it in some way, green tone, selenium, sepia, you name it I tried it. I tried it using the toning section of Lightroom (blech…), Using a custom color tone inside the black and white adjustment of Photoshop, used the hue and saturation adjustment in PS, and so on…..Finally I remembered doutoning…..and my life was just a little bit better. Now, my negatives are definitely lacking from the beginning, just within the last few weeks have I developed an understanding of expansion and contraction of the negative through development, so hopefully in the near future, my techniques will work out more at capture and development rather than relying on PS and post work in the computer, that is why I started shooting film and large format in the first place right! But until that Eureka day, I’ll rely on curves and levels in PS. Call me impure or whatever…I don’t much care yet….the learning as I go is much more important to me. Through my readings and such I have learned that toning was used in the past to help increase contrast (as well as help preserve longevity of the negative) when all the development controls in place failed to give the desired contrast. (Hmmm…..yup that sounds like my negatives). Rather than mess with more chemicals I decided to give it a go in PS, and VIOLA!!!!…I love it. Not only do I have a very apparent increase in contrast, there is now the lovely brownish/sepia toning to my images that really make them stand out. Unfortunately the duotone mode in PS only works in 8bit mode so I lose a bit of file depth in the process, but really its the last step in my process so its a non-issue for me at the moment. To give it a try yourself, using a duplicate of your original scan (your going to discard all color information, which isn’t a big deal for a BW scan, but just to be safe) you’ll go to VIEW>MODE>GREYSCALE, you’ll get a dialog box asking if you really want to discard all color information, click yuppers, then go to VIEW>MODE>DUOTONE.
Now you’ve gots lots of Choices: Monotone, Duotone, Tritone, Quadtone.
Next you have to chose the colors. My personal preference is Duotone then Preset: ’478 brown (100%) bl 2′ to start with….
Once you select a preset you can tweak the curves by clicking on them, this is where the real power is. I have not messed with the ‘Overprint Colors’ yet. When your done you will have to go back to VIEW>MODE>RGB in order to save it out as a jpeg, if not your only option is to save as a PSD. It will ask you to flatten the layers or not. Sometimes I have major color shifts without flattening. In that case I just back up CONTROL Z (undo the flatten and RGB mode) the save as a PSD first. Then go ahead and flatten the image to preserve the color and output as a jpeg.
So I was sitting there on ebay….yea…and there they were! Two boxes of VERY expired Fuji Provia for $10. I snagged them up, and in one afternoon I ran a whole box of 10 sheets through the Wisner. Two days later I boxed them up and shipped them off to Reeds Photo in Colorado, then headed back to work. Now the box that I used expired in 1996 so to be honest I was not expecting much to come back but maybe some funky colored mess….but for $5 I didn’t much care. I was surprised to say the least when I got home and pulled the box of processed slides out of the mailbox. There they were in all their glory…..gorgeous 4×5 transparencies. There is something to behold in a large format negative, but reversals….OMG…(yes i just wrote OMG) they are stunning to behold. I’m hooked, can’t wait to shoot off the other old box (expired 2003). I learned quite a bit from just getting those old expired slides back too, I forgot that you have to meter for the highlights with slides just like digital, in the shot of the bike details you will see a patch of snow under the pedals is VERY white….YUP its blown out. I used the Incident reading from my meter which worked out EH OK….I got some decent shadow detail, and pulled some detail back in other white areas after scanning in ACR. Next time I’ll spot meter the highlights and decide where they need to fall, hoping my shadows will fall into the scene well. Hopefully that next box will give me enough info to start shooting the new boxes of Velvia and Provia in the freezer in the coming months. I’ll tell you, writing about this now, 8000 miles away from home and my 4×5 makes me yearn to bring it with me…I carry digital with me to work, It’s simply easier for travel, although I almost brought a 645 with me instead this time. It’s definitely becoming a problem deciding what to travel with. I had settled on 35mm back a bit ago, but being stuck with one film stock at a time was becoming a hinderance, carrying 3 bodies just to keep with the changing lighting and such was way to inconvenient for just travel images. With the 645 I at least can carry one body and just have 2-3 backs available for swapping out. I also find that I really only use 1 or 2 lenses with the 645, a 45mm and an 80mm. preferring to be super close with the 45 and the 80, well….lets just say that wide open f2.8 80mm and Medium Format were just made to work beautifully together. It’s like Digital 85mm f1.2….with GOBBS of detail out the arse. They just sing, couple it with some muted Portra 160 and they go all sorts of dreamy…(can I use dreamy as a dude and not break some sort of tribal code….IDUNNO….but i just did!) DREAMY…Yes…pastel like colors and skin tones that are hard to duplicate with anything else….. Anyway enough of my banter for today, here’s my “snapshots” with film mfg’d in 1987…. 
Don’t worry, I haven’t gotten off track already. I just needed to schedule something to post on a regular basis, so why not some of my Large Format lessons learned pics. Most of these so far have been very antiseptic, as i’m still getting used to metering, tonal placement, and obviously composition with a large format camera. About a year ago I found myself in possession of a Wisner Technical Field 4×5 view camera, and its been a very long journey of frustration and learning with it. It has only recently (within a week or two) that I have really begun to understand what my light meter is telling me, and how to interpret it to make a decent negative. For those of you that have been doing this for years, I envy you! My first real photography adventures only began about 6 years ago, and with digital. I thought I had it all under control until this beast walked in the door. It was 2-3 months after receiving it that I finally made my first negative with it, not owning a LF lens at the time, it took me a while to find one I thought would fit me for a while. I settled on a 240mm Schneider Tele-Xenar f5.5, then quickly realized I should have went for the 210mm or the 150mm. Not that there was anything wrong with the 240, it was just a bit long for my trials in working with the camera for the first time that’s all. I now have a Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S 150mm f5.6 that I end up using as a general purpose lens. As I progress with it I’ll be sure to write more about it. but for now here are just a few of my photos.
Over the years of ‘operating’ this site….and I use operating VERY loosely, i have used several ways of integrating images into the posts here. Some came from a now defunct flickr account, some from another hosting service, some used a themes built in gallery system, and yet some were embedded using WordPress built in system. Being that, I want to be the first to say that as I go through and rebuild this site some of the content may be missing. Bear with me as I work on fixing these things… |
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