Category Archives: photography
Kiomizu Waterfall
I felt like artistically experimenting so I loaded some TriX 400 and went out on a sunny day to shoot it at ISO 1600. I went to a pretty nearby waterfall and took some shots. I then pushed it 2 stops in HC110 dilution B by doing 1.4 * 1.4 times the nominal development time.
In general increasing development 1.4x is equal to increasing the film speed by one stop.
Normally this is done to achieve better speeds in low light situations, but I found the effect it has on contrast and grain to be artistically pleasing for selected shots in bright light. It has a kind of vintage look to me.
Crossprocessed view from a stupa on a hillside
There is a white stupa on a hillside that I have wanted to go and check out for 1.5 years now, but have been too lazy to. The other weekend I finally hopped on my scooter and went. I also took my Nikon F601 film SLR loaded with color film which I intented to cross-process.
I shot the film as normal, but then developed the C41 color film in B&W chemicals myself.
When you develop film in the wrong chemicals you often get very interesting (and artistic) results. In this case developing color negative film in B&W chemicals gives a grainy negative B&W image of degraded yet artistically appealing quality.
The negatives are also so incredibly dark that they probably can’t be printed the traditional way and need to be scanned. My strips of film look almost black, yet I was able to get some lovely vintage looking images off of them by scanning. The color comes from the orange base of the film and the unprocessed dye layers in the color film.
This is the view of the town as seen from the hill where the stupa is.
On a dark lonely night
I wanted to try a long exposure star trail shot, so I hopped on my scooter and headed off into the country after dark. Like most places I couldn’t really escape light pollution. I settled on this scary, dark place with no artificial light in direct sight in a valley with a very rocky river. It was quite scary by myself there at night. I don’t think there was another soul within earshot.
I used my old Mamiyaflex TLR and a role of T-MAX 400 film I bought by accident. This photo was about 30 minutes.
Sitting in the cold, dark, with bats flying around and animals in the dark thinking of eating me was an interesting experience, but this is a photo technique I want to experiment with some more!
Turtle Shrine in Nagasaki
My girlfriend and I visited Nagasaki a few weekends ago. I stumbled upon this very unusual place. It has a Buddhist like statue standing n the back of a huge turtle which is a museum of sorts with some old Chinese furniture in it and some bones of atomic bomb victims. There was a crazy old Japanese woman there who whisked my girlfriend and I around and spoke broken English to explain the exhibits. Even though my gf is Japanese, she spoke English because she prefers it to her native language.
(photos taken on my vintage TLR and developed myself.)
A huge pendulum hangs from the head of the statue standing on top of the turtle temple in the previous photo. In the basement of the building the Earth’s rotation makes it swing and knock over metal rods as the day moves on.
My 50 year old camera has a bigger, higher resolution screen than your fancy new digi-cam :-P
Twin lens reflex cameras like my Mamiyaflex and Yashica MAT are almost magical to use. The upper lens gathers an image which is reflected off of a mirror onto a ground glass screen which is about the same size as the 6cm x 6cm negative this camera produces. The screen is larger and higher resolution than any digital camera … and it uses no batteries! I show people my 50 year old camera and they think it is digital sometimes.
Sadly, most people these days have never had an opportunity to handle a camera like this and this design has faded away in favor of SLRs that you hold in front of your face.
This photo is not edited at all. What you are seeing is the actual screen of the camera which was aimed at a bridge and hills on a sunny day. The position that I was standing in was shaded from the sunshine.
I was shooting infrared film that comes with no printed ISO rating and was all guesswork and I overexposed the shot you see here by a good bit. I might post it later, although it’s not one of my better photos.
Here is a previous post showing photos of this awesome camera.
TLR family history
On my recent visit to the US, my uncle gave me an old Mamiyaflex TLR that had been sitting in his house for decades unused. He knew that I was interested in TLRs and had been using an old Yashica TLR.
On that same trip while looking through an old family album, I found a photo of my uncle and mom and that very camera. The photo was from 1977. I would have been one year old at the time the photo was taken (I’m not in the photo.)
I have been curious about the history of my old Yashica and who might have used it and what it had seen. It’s really cool to discover a piece of the history of my new (old) Mamiyaflex TLR! I need to ask my uncle more about this camera since it was manufactured between 1958-1962′ish … long before this photo was taken. I wonder if he didn’t buy it used.
The B&W photos I have been posting recently have been taken with this camera.
The Mamiyaflex TLR as my uncle gave it to me (2008)
My mother holding my uncle’s (to her left) old Mamiyaflex (1977)
Ansel Adams’s “Zone System” at work
I recently read Ansel Adams’s book “The Camera” and now I’m reading “The Negative” in which he explains the Zone System – a system he conceptualized for controlling your images more.
I already understood exposure and often used exposure compensation and changed my camera’s metering mode to deal with different situations. But I was still somewhat at the mercy of my camera and what it considered an “average” exposure. Now I am taking more control of my images and understanding the relationship of tones better with regards to exposure, particularly highlights and shadows.
So often we take photos and the highlights are whited out, or the shadows have no detail, or it’s just not how we envisioned it. The Zone System really helps with that. This photo is how I conceptualized it. If left up to a camera with a built-in exposure meter it would have probably silhouetted the structure or whited of the sky. Using the spot meter of my old Canon Powershot I decided to put the darkest part of the structure to the left in zone II and this allowed me to preserve tonality in both structures and the sky.
This photo was shot at Canal City in Fukuoka, a very architecturally interesting, large, modern shopping mall on an overcast, rainy day with my ~1958 Mamiyaflex TLR.
My new old toy
Earlier this year I bought a used 35mm Nikon F601 (N6006 in the West), film camera. I began shooting B&W but when I found out that I always had to have my film sent out for processing and it took 10 days in the area I was in, I decided to try developing it myself.
I’ve always enjoyed doing things by hand, so I learned about developing film, bought the necessary items (some mail order from the U.S. because I couldn’t find them in my somewhat rural Japanese town), and gave it a try! The necessary chemicals and accessories were probably less than $100 to get started.
I develop the film in my bathroom, then scan the negatives. It is a lot of fun and very rewarding. I have yet to try color film which is a bit more challenging because the chemical have to be kept very warm through the process.
I’ve always loved old cameras, but have been too practical to buy one that I knew I would or could never use. Now that I develop my own film, I feel very free to buy old cameras and give them a try since I can do the film myself!
This is my new old toy. It is a Yashica MAT-124 from circa 1970. It is in excellent working condition and quite a piece of art. It gets me a lot of looks when I’m out on the street with it. So far I’ve only shot one roll. I takes 120 medium format film. It even has a working light meter!
彼女
As I said in my last post, I’m not currently having fun with sterile, overly clean, digital photos anymore so I’ve been shooting film, trying to create images which are affected by their medium and have character without digital manipulation.
This photo is as-shot on IR film with no digital editing.
White waves of rice
I have been shooting a lot of black and white and learning and experimenting with film and developing it myself. I don’t really have any spectacular photos to show for it yet, but I am really enjoying the process. I’m tired of the sterile, clean, colorful look of digital. I want my photos to reflect their recording medium with grain, and maybe even a little dirt, imperfect focus, etc. Much like the roughness and texture of texture and paint take away clear details, yet contribute overall to the aesthetics of a painting.
This is a rice field shot on infrared sensitive panchromatic film through a deep red filter.
