Leaving the Tripod at Home

I have always been a bit of a stickler about using a tripod. That might seem pretty obvious for a guy who uses a beast like a Mamiya RB67 most of the time, but it was true even back in the day when owning such a camera was a pipe dream. I had a good tripod (the Manfrotto 055 I still use to this day) before ever considering things like a second Nikon body or additional lenses. Then as now it was always the meditative approach for me. While I've always embraced my contemplative side I sometimes wonder if I let it stifle other aspects of creativity like spontaneity, novelty and whimsy. It's hard to really cut loose with a camera that's stuck to a tripod. It can be done I suppose, (think Salvadore Dali and flying cats) but why make it harder?

Hand held medium format from the Iskra folder. For compact on the go portability I think beats your typical 35mm SLR without sacrificing those big sharp 6x6 negatives, nothing beats this style of camera.

I've been giving some thought lately to what it would mean not to be so tied to a tripod all the time. At other times in my life, when the kids were younger and in my wedding photography career, an overwhelming majority of the photography I was doing was almost the polar opposite of the kind of work I do these days and the Manfrotto was seeing some serious closet time. It's not that I'm thinking of returning to that kind of photography. Wedding photography and having young kids are two things I enjoyed and that I am so done with now. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean I have to accept the limitations of a tripod, not all the time.

In a previous entry When The Tourists Are Away... I wondered if I'd have made out a little better going tripod free with a 35mm camera. Well I did get a chance to make a return visit, this time packing two Nikons - an F80 loaded with Ilford Delta 100 and an FE with some expired Fuji Superia for colour. Also along was the Iskra folder. Going handheld doesn't mean I have to give up medium format after all.

What looked like a toy fence, coming up to about mid shin on me, would have been chest high absent the snow.

The results you can see so there's little need to comment. It was a different sort of day that my earlier visit, generally overcast with an occasional opening in the clouds letting through direct sun. The landscape had also changed in the intervening weeks, with much more snow that in many cases covered over the glassy coating of ice that formed as mist froze. On the other hand it gave the whole scene more of a winter wonderland feel.

The experience I have to say was mixed. On the positive side yes there were shots I probably wouldn't have been able to catch with a camera bound to a tripod, especially in a few cases where there were people in the shot who would have moved on if I didn't have the ability to bring the camera right up and fire. The freedom to explore a subject also came into play now and then as well. It wasn't so much the small adjustments that sometimes need to be done to get the camera positioned in exactly the right spot, I can do this just as well, if not better, when working from a tripod. It's more those situations I'm not sure of such as when it appears an awkward or impossible camera position is required, or that presents compositional challenges there might or might not be a solution for. In short if, it seems there's a good chance the effort to get the shot I envision could be in vain, the added difficulty of having to manhandle a tripod through the process might keep me from trying in the first place.

I once had a summer job at a hotel not far from these. Amazing how many people arrive for the first time expecting a rustic cabin and thinking Niagara Falls was located in a wilderness preserve. In reality it aspires to become the Las Vegas of the North. It seems people don't gamble away their savings like they used to though, which I'm informed is a bad thing.

I have to say though, shooting like this did make me lazy, lazy enough not to bother digging out a filter if I thought it would help, lazy enough that there were occasions where I chose not to take the shot rather than go to the bother of swapping lenses between the two Nikons. Arguably if I couldn't be bothered it wasn't worth the effort or the wasted film anyway, but I just wasn't as invested in the subject or the process and it\s hard to tell myself that's a good thing. And lest it be forgotten, a tripod is more than just the camera gear equivalent a hair shirt meant to heighten our awareness of the photographic process through penance. Even at shutter speeds above the 1/focal length rule of thumb, hand held camera shake can cause enough sharpness loss to erase the benefits of using a top notch lens.

It's all food for thought. It may need some time to digest though, so it's a bit soon to say whether any of this will change the way I do things in the end. I'm certainly not ready to shelve the tripod or the Mamiya, though I can't help but think some tweak may be in order. As always I'll keep you posted.

Budget Time Travel: A Photographer's Guide

The surface of Lake Erie, February 2015. Perhaps if one were to visit this exact spot in another two million years or so it would look quite similar, with sand and rock standing in for the snow and ice seen here.

If you've been following this blog for any length of time you'll know I belong to that large group of photographers for whom location and subject are usually one and the same thing. In order to have some measure of variety in our work travel is a virtual requirement, though for myself and others with similar restrictions on time and finances this need not involve a globe trotting lifestyle.

As I was in the midst of shooting the images featured in today's episode, my mind as usual wandering a different landscape than my body, it occurred to me a photographer could bring similar variety to their portfolios if we could travel in time rather than space, zooming into the future and watching the landscape change around them. Seasons would pass before our hypothetical photographer's eyes, bringing a lifetime worth of change in only minutes. They might grab a few shots as whatever apocalypse eventually befalls us all passes by in time lapse quick time then watch as the forces of climate and geology transform the landscape, perhaps turning a sea-side vista into a desert.

White on white subject matter in not particularly contrasty light made for some pretty flat looking negatives. On the light table the last negative taken on a previous day on the left and the shot taken just previously to the above image above on the right, side by side on the same negative strip. Contrast is fairly easy to adjust in a scan but it should be interesting to see what it takes to print this in the darkroom.

I do travel through time of course - forward only at the rate of one minute per minute like everyone else. I might hope for epoch spanning powers, but alas yet another Christmas has come and gone and once again no Tardis under the tree for me. But if the ability to zoom back and forth through time still eludes me there are times and places where nature transforms a landscape so rapidly as to present the illusion of the passage of geological ages in the course of just days or weeks. Though such occasions often follow in the wake of floods, volcanic eruptions or other such disasters, the trigger may be as benign as a change of seasons. And if you're lucky enough to live by one of the Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie (the shallowest and therefore first to freeze) all it takes is the onset of a solid winter.

In a way this is really the third installment in an unplanned series that started with Embracing the Elements and A Follow Up Visit. The images are from my second follow-up visit made in the first week of February. The location once again is my usual lake shore stomping grounds which, somewhat ironically perhaps, was once the site of a popular summer resort. It's where I go when I don't have much time and don't feel inspired enough to look for something new to photograph.  As you can imagine, under normal circumstances it's getting hard to find anything fresh to photograph, but a winter like this transforms it into a whole new location. A few weeks of cold weather is all it takes to transform my sea side vista into a desert landscape so long as you don't mind the fact the ground is covered by snow instead of sand. (Actually, in a whipping wind with temperatures in the -15^oC neighbourhood, I did mind just a little.)

A shot from the Nikon F80 equipped with a Tamron SP 20-40mm lens and a yellow filter. I didn't have much choice about the filter as it, along with the red filter I attached the Mamiya's 50mm Sekor lens, wouldn't budge once I screwed it on until I got home and everything warmed back up. 

Equipment wise I brought my usual RB67 kit, this time bringing my Nikon F80 sporting a Tamron 20-40mm zoom as a side arm. Obviously I'm not using the Nikon enough as the roll of Ilford Delta 100 I managed to finish that day bore a few family photos that were obviously taken last summer. By the sound of things its built in auto-wind motor was obviously struggling in the cold, and doubly so on the rewind, but it soldiered on admirably and the resulting negatives were none the worse for it. The cold also affected the film back on the RB67 as the mechanism became sluggish resulting in its failure to register that the film had been wound meaning the double-exposure prevention had to be overridden. Of course this meant I had to pay careful attention to avoid double-exposures or accidentally skipping over frames. Not the easiest thing for me. As we've seen, my mind wanders.

There will probably be more winter photography to come over the remaining weeks. The replacement spot meter arrived today (see the previous post if you missed it) and I have some time off over the next couple of days to try it. I also have hopes that some of winter's more unique conditions will coincide with a time I'm free to get out there with a camera. It has to happen sooner or later. Still, if it so happens I don't squeeze off another shot until spring I can comfort myself with the thought that this year already winter isn't another season I let get away.

A Spot Meter's Epitaph

Ah Spot, we hardly knew ye. I had hopes that by the time I sat down to write this it wouldn't be a eulogy for another beloved gadget gone to camera equipment heaven, but alas let's all bow our heads. While I haven't mentioned it previously, about a month ago, on the outing I wrote about in Embracing the Elements, my Pentax Spotmeter V suddenly stopped giving readings, each press of the trigger button resulting in only a small deflection of the needle in the opposite direction of the reading scale. Fresh batteries didn't help and in any case the battery check showed there was power with either the old or new set. When I got home I pulled it appart but after several sessions of poking around looking for loose connections, shaking and blasting canned air to flush out debris that might be shorting connections and spraying with contact cleaner, no dice.

I managed to finish that days shooting by guesstimating exposures based on experience and the readings I had been getting up until the meter gave up the ghost, the resulting negatives appearing no worse for it. Since then I have been operating with my second meter, a Gossen Luna-Lux. While its simple over/under LED indicator is less refined than its more sophisticated Lunasix and Luna-Pro cousins, it's accurate and I can't recall a time when I wasn't able to get good exposures using it. I used it exclusively on the day I wrote about in my previous post and had no exposure issues. In fact on the outing I wrote about in A Follow Up Visit I used no meter at all, relying solely on my experience with the old Sunny 16 Rule, again without any bad exposures. 

But despite all this success without the Pentax, at least in terms of exposure determination, the current situation is something I can only regard as a temporary work-around. Accurate though the Gossen may be, and as handy as its option to switch between incident and reflected metering is, it's not a spot meter. 

Here is where I should pause as I don't want to take my reader's knowledge of metering too much for granted, especially when it comes to something as old-school as using hand-held meters. Briefly then, straight-up reflected metering will be familiar to many as the method used with the built-in metering in cameras, at least before the days of computerized evaluative scene analysis. It simply looks at all the light coming from the scene and gives you the exposure settings that will render it all as an average brightness scene. Adjustments may need to be made for scenes that should appear more or less than average brightness such as a snowy landscape or coal pile. Doing reflective readings with a hand-held meter can be even more challenging since all you can do is point it in the general direction of the scene where readings may be skewed by things that don't appear in the scene as seen through the viewfinder. 

Incident metering allows you to base your exposure on the amount of light it reads falling on to your subject, a simple and brilliant method as there is no need to account for how light or dark the subject itself is. For a guy who does primarily landscape type work however it's usually not possible to go to where my subject is to measure the light, so unless I'm confident the light is exactly the same where I'm standing it may not be possible to get a meaningful reading this way. 

The view through the Pentax Spotmeter V. The circle above the 11
on the exposure scale indicates the area that the meter reads from.

Spot meters are really just very discriminating reflected meters, having their own viewfinders with a smallish circle in the middle that indicates the actual area the meter is measuring. In the case of the Pentax Spotmeter V the area measured roughly equates to what you'd see through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera equipped with a 2400mm lens (something that would probably be more accurately described as a telescope.) Most other hand-held meters I'm aware of are roughly the same. In addition to the hand-held variety however, many more modern cameras include a spot metering option with their built-in meters, which I imagine would include many 35mm SLRs new enough to have autofocus as well as, of course, all but the most basic DSLRs and those rangefinder-like lensless digital jobbies. Whatever the case the ability to measure just a small portion of the scene being photographed allows a photographer to, for example, pick out one small area of the scene with average brightness and base their exposure on this knowing that nothing else in the viewfinder is skewing the readings. Taking it one step further they could also take a few readings from different parts of the scene, say the lightest and the darkest parts, then chose an exposure that ensures both ends of the scale will stay within the films exposure range. Add a few more conceptual details and you have Ansel Adams's famous Zone System. 

I cut my teeth on the Zone System, at least once I started to fall in love with black and white work. Specifically it was the version I learned from The Zone VI Workshop by the late Fred Picker. (The Zone System, for those of you not acquainted, makes use of Roman numerals, so that reads "The Zone Six Workshop.) I don't know if the way I go about things these days still qualifies me as a user of the Zone System. Dedicated practitioners may turn their noses up at the subjective loosey-goosey way I go about determining personal film speed (box speed is usually perfect with the acutance developers I favour) and developing times (start with the Massive Dev Chart recommendation and adjust to taste), I still use it conceptually to determine exposures when shooting however, and so long as I have the other variables controlled it doesn't let me down. And using the Zone System, in practical terms, really demands the use of a spot meter. 

But while a spot meter gets me reliable results, would they be any less reliable if I used other methods? Others may dispute this, but it's always been my experience that, saving for demanding high-contrast situations, with black and white film there is a range of exposures which could be considered equally correct in terms of the final results that can be obtained without heroic measures in the darkroom. It's not hard to hit that range most of the time without any meter at all, virtually always with a simple reflected meter as a sanity check. If you add the fact that its also possible for me to use incident metering in most situations I find myself in, it would be really quite rare for me to get an exposure using a spot meter that wouldn't have been just as good if I'd used something less specialized or even no meter at all. Compared to the number of exposures I lose for other reasons (most commonly cock ups resulting from the odd little quirks three of the four RB67 backs I own have) I might do well to worry more about those things and less about metering. 

Still, as I write these words there's another Pentax Spotmeter V that I found at a decent price on eBay on its way to me. Why bother if I could do just as well without it? I think it comes down to a sense of control. Having absorbed the Zone System zeitgeist I can't help thinking in those terms no matter what I'm shooting with or using to measure light levels. I know, for example, that that rock over there has a certain value relative to those clouds up there regardless of whether I have a spot meter to measure it. Just trusting that it'll all work out in the final image bugs me even if, in the end, I would have set the camera to f/11 at 1/30th of a second in any case. I still enjoy shooting this way, just not as much. I hope that package comes soon.

When The Tourists Are Away...

In past entries I've noted how, as a local, Niagara Falls doesn't have the sort of magnetic draw on my camera lenses that seem to hold sway with visitors to the area. For the past several years however it's been my intent to visit during the much more photographically interesting and visitor sparse height of winter. Past years have not been kind to my plans. Last year I let the unusual cold take away my photographic mojo which only returned when things warmed up, and the several years prior to that were too warm for there to be a real dead of winter.

It didn't occur to me at a time but coated and weighed down by ice this tree reminds me of a Shetland Pony.

Though not quite so frigid as last year, this January has been accompanied by some solidly winter weather, and with my mojo fully intact I finally set out to ensure another year wouldn't pass without getting a crack at the area around the Falls. It wasn't so much the Falls itself I was after, though they too take on added interest in the presence of great quantities of ice. The real draw was the heavy glaze of ice that covers almost everything in the surrounding area. The mist rising from the torrent below that in warmer months drenches countless unprepared tourists begins to freeze on the surface of anything that doesn't move as the temperatures drop, turning trees and other fixed objects into virtual ice sculptures.

I brought what has become my standard kit - Mamiya RB67 Pro S with all four lenses for it I own, 50mm, 65mm, 127mm and 250mm, three backs loaded with Fuji Acros for black and white, Kodak Portra 160 for colour and a roll of 35mm Ilford Delta 100 with my home made 120 adapter for panoramas, Manfrotto 055 tripod, light meter, and the usual sundries like filters, cable release etc. I also brought along the Minolta Hi-Matic 9 loaded with some Fuji Superia 400 I've kept in the freezer for about ten years. As I write this I have yet to finish off any of the colour rolls I was shooting that day so images from those are yet to come. Also, as the 35mm roll in the RB67 back had been a partial roll, I was unaware that there was only one frame left and since it has to be unloaded in the darkroom when finished I was unable to reload in the field. 

These windows are part of an odd looking rail-car, the purpose of which I can't guess. It's enclosed in its own little fenced off enclosure suggesting it has some sort of historical value. It has plenty of character and I'd love to explore it with a camera more but the fence itself gets in the way. I was able to see a bit more this day though by standing on a show bank.

If rainbows in b&w are not your thing I did get a colour version of this which you may see once I finish the roll.

As anyone familiar with the RB67 will realize this is quite a load, but my middle aged, desk job soft self can still manage a haul of a few KM over reasonable terrain when I've got it all loaded into the big photo backpack. That's pretty much what I set myself up to do when as usual I chose the free parking at the Dufferin Islands park and walked the rest of the way. I might have saved myself some effort had I realized that not only was this normally heavily maintained area neglected in the off-season, and that likewise they don't bother maintaining the tourist premium parking rates closer to the Falls when there are next to no tourists arriving. Though I could have avoided the slog, it's over now and I burned off all those extra calories.

If I had it to do over again, and with at a good month or more of winter yet to come I guess I do, I think I would have been better served if I had left the Mamiya at home in this case in favour of a Nikon used hand-held. Shooting tripod mounted is almost habitual for me but in this case I felt it held me back from exploring all the compositional options I found myself confronted with. I was glad of the Hi-Matic I brought with me, allowing me to be a little more free-wheeling though with one of the Mamiya backs loaded with Portra I found myself wishing I had loaded it with black and white film.

The one panoramic image I was able to get on 35mm film adapted to the RB67. As I had no idea how many shots were on the partial roll to begin with there was no way to know that there was only one exposure remaining and as it had to be removed in the darkroom I couldn't put in a fresh roll in the field.

Matters of shooting style aside however, this was one day that using a waist level finder, currently my only option with the RB67, put me at a disadvantage. This isn't always the case, and in fact there are times when using a waist level finder has been a revelation. For example landscape shots featuring a prominent foreground object often require shooting from an angle low enough to have an eye-level finder user crawling on their belly to frame up the shot. Even when the shot doesn't require such low angles, shooting with a camera held at chest level rather than the same height we are used to seeing the world from can subtly add interest to images through the slightly unfamiliar point of view. Putting my armchair psychologist hat on the lower eye level implied may even be suggestive of a child's point of view, triggering whatever emotional responses that might involve for a particular viewer. This waist-level point of view has been noted as an important component in Vivian Maier's style. Perhaps the child's perspective would also make sense in the work of the word's most (belatedly) famous TLR toting nanny. 

There's a flip side to this of course, as obtaining a perspective higher than waist-level requires a step ladder or some reasonable substitute. For example, in image at the top of the post I was aware that the top of the tree intersected with the top of the falls and that I could remedy this by raising the height of the camera but as I need to look down on the camera from above to see what was in the shot, doing so would have left me shooting blind. Like most medium format SLRs the RB67 has interchangeable viewfinders and I have considered getting an eye-level finder for situations like this. Of course to really benefit I'd have to bring along both finders and switch as needed, adding yet another item to an already heavy pack. Not as heavy as carrying a step-ladder with me mind you, so I may yet do this.

There are more images to come. The images here are from the first roll of Fuji Acros that went through the Mamiya as well as the aforementioned single panoramic image on 35mm film. In addition to the colour images still in camera there's a second roll of Acros with images from that day that's also waiting to be finished. As always I'll keep you posted.  

How I Learned to Hate Scanning Less

One of the unsung heroes in my photographic arsenal is my Epson Perfection V500 scanner. While not as hyped in the flatbed film scanning world as it's large format capable siblings in the V700/800 series, for medium format on down it's nearly as capable at a fraction of the cost. The slightly over $100 (Cdn) clearance price I picked it up for is quite possibly the best money I have ever spend on photographic equipment of any kind.

My praise of just about everything about this scanner ends however at the included negative carriers. They're flimsy yes, though considering they're meant to hold precious one of a kind original images one would hope they wouldn't need to endure anything approaching man-handling. (Speaking as a man I'm not sure if I resent that term.) More to the point however it is notoriously difficult to get negatives into them, a difficulty that seems to grow exponentially with the degree of film curl present in those negatives. Two strips of 35mm film can be placed in the 35mm holder so they are held relatively securely at one end, leaving the remainder of the strips entirely loose so they must be manipulated to stay aligned in their frames as the top part of the frame holder, an entirely separate piece, is clipped into place over them. The 120 holder has next to nothing to keep the negative strip in place until the the hinged top of the frame is closed, an operation which itself tends to push them out of place and efforts to hold it in place may result in the film buckling. Further, once closed I would often find the negative had shifted enough to require a small reposition leaving me to decide whether it was better to start the whole operation over again or trying to adjust it with the carrier clamped closed which always had me worried about scratching or otherwise damaging the negative (though I don't know that any actual harm ever resulted from this).

The stock 120 carrier for the Epson Perfection V500 (above)
along with the Lomography 120 DigtaLIZA (below.)

Enter the Lomography DigitaLIZA, an alternative negative/transparency carrier with a unique positioning and loading system that among other things is supposed to avoid most of the problems common to other carriers such as the ones I have experienced. It is also, apparently, exact enough to allow 35mm negatives to be held by the very edge of the film, allowing the sprocket hole area of the film to be part of the scan. The trick involves a metal plate that sits in the bottom of the frame bringing everything flush to the ledge the film sits on. After positioning the film an upper magnetic plate is positioned on top, clamping to the metal plate underneath, sandwiching the film flat and exactly in place. The hinged frame can now be closed without fear the film will shift in the process, at which time the upper plate can be pulled free, releasing the lower plate while the film remains perfectly in place.

If it's a bit convoluted to describe in words Lomography hosts a video showing the process which you can see here.

This much you could have learned from the Lomography site, so how does all of this translate into practice? After fighting with the Epson carriers one too many times I decided it was worth a go. Much of the fanfare surrounding the DigitaLIZA focuses on the 35mm version's ability to make include nearly the full width of the film during scanning including the sprocket holes.  Photographers who use adapters to shoot 35mm film in medium format cameras or other tricks to get an image across the whole width of the film have few other practical choices for getting this additional image width scanned. While I experiment with techniques like this myself, 120 film is by far the majority of what I shoot these days, and its the format I struggle with the most using the stock carriers, so it was the medium format version that I ordered. At the time of this writing the 120 DigitaLIZA goes for $45 (US) in the Lomography store, but with a bit of shopping around may be found for less through some resellers.

It arrived in attractively designed custom box that makes it tempting to carefully repackage the unit after every use rather than toss it in a drawer. If the box board thin Epson carrier struck me as a little flimsy before it seems even more so compared the the DigitaLIZA, especially when the metal bottom plate is attached. Despite the more rugged build the film is still sits in the holder at about the same distance from the scanner glass as is the case with the stock Epson carrier.

The DigitaLIZA's frame window is wide enough to accommodate three 6x6 negatives at once. If you shoot square format and cut film into strips of four you'll have to reposition the film once to scan the whole strip. Since I primarily shoot 6x7 negatives the window will allow only two negatives to be scanned, so a repositioning will again be required to scan a strip of three. By itself this is an improvement over the Epson carrier, which permits only two 6x6 negatives to be scanned at a time, only one at a time for larger 120 formats, and if you shoot panoramic formats larger than 6x12 you could be in trouble.

The bigger point however isn't how often negatives have to be repositioned, it's how easy they are to position in the first place. If all my negatives layed dead flat I probably wouldn't have too much to complain about with the Epson carrier but even a bit of curl is enough to make positioning the frame properly without risking damage or getting fingerprints all over the image into a struggle. To look at Lomography's video demo it would seem like loading the DigiaLIZA couldn't be simpler, but does the seemingly foolproof mechanism go this smoothly in actual use?

Well, for the most part yes, yes it does. When the negative strip is first placed in the carrier it sits in a recess deep enough to keep the edges of the film from going anywhere. This is in contrast the stock carrier's ledge which is much too shallow to keep the film from sliding around or buckling, something that tends to happen as the hinged frame is closed, The DigitaLIZA further largely avoids problems keeping the film held in place while the top part of the holder is closed down with the magnetic top plate that is put in place once the negative strip is aligned, holding it there until the hinged lid is closed at which plate it can be removed without risk of the film slipping out of place. I say largely avoids because with more severely curled film I find getting the top plate in place without the film moving can be a small challenge, though nothing compared to the struggle that would be needed to get the same images ready to scan with the stock carrier. This small difficulty aside the DigitaLIZA's loading mechanism aside it has worked for me as advertised.

Once loaded however the DigitaLIZA does have a downside compared to Epson's carriers for the V500 however - there is no provision to get it positioned correctly on the scanning bed. This might not be a concern at all with large format units that can scan the entire area of the scanning bed, but the V500 and similar flatbeds designed for smaller formats require the film to be lined up under the transparency scanning strip in the lid. The stock carriers are designed to align with this automatically. As a universal carrier, the DigitaLIZA has no such provision. Lining things up by eye would probably be good enough to get the entire negative into the scanning zone, but it almost certainly wouldn't be square to the edge. In cases like this it\s necessary to come up with some sort of alignment device. A simple cardboard strip of appropriate width would do the trick, though I found I could use the lower plate from the DigitaLIZA's magnetic positioning system does the job admirably and I suspect this would be the case for most scanners.

A comparison of scans from the Epson Perfection V500 using the stock 120
 negative carrier and the 120 version of the Lomography DigitaLIZA.

The only question that remained is whether there was any impact on the scan quality. Might the magnetic sandwich positioning system hold the film flatter leading to sharper scans? Might the film to scan bed distance differ from what is spec for my scanner making scans a little less sharp. I put this one to the test scanning by scanning the same image using both carriers and to my eye the results are functionally identical. If you'd rather judge for yourself I include the comparison images above for your own consideration. The insets show crops at full resolution from identical areas of each scan made at 3200 dpi. (Click to bring the image up at full resolution.)

The bottom line is that, at the cost of auto alignment provisions you may get with a flatbed film scanner's stock carriers, the DigitaLIZA addresses the shortcomings these carriers are often plagued with in regards to positioning and loading of negatives and transparencies. Not only is this task made easier While the 35mm's big selling feature, the ability scan the width of the film out to and including the sprocket holes, does not apply to the 120 version, this benefit alone may make the DigitaLIZA well worth the price in terms of saved time and diminished risk of damaging irreplaceable images as a result of buckling, scratching or throwing the whole mess at a wall in frustration.

A Follow Up Visit

I have a day job. The standard two days off a week that might or might not end up being the sort of days that inspire photography if indeed none of life's little obligations has me otherwise committed. If I'm not careful an entire season to pass with almost no new work to show. After letting last winter go by this way I'm hopeful the outing I wrote about in my previous entry Embracing the Elements marks the start of a more productive season this year, establishing a bit of momentum as it were. 

So it was a few days back that an unexpectedly heavy winter blast and accompanying highway closure gifted me with an unexpected day off I felt the opportunity accompanied by a bit of pressure to keep the ball rolling by taking photographic advantage of the situation. This was enhanced by the fact that by the time I had the driveway clear enough to go anywhere the morning light along with the peak of the freshly fallen snow look had both deteriorated into something less photogenic. It was turning into an unremarkable day with some not quite so virgin snow all around. Something could still come of that, you never know, but the slight sinking feeling in my gut told me the best part of this opportunity had already slipped away, taking some of that momentum with it.

Hoping things would get interesting later on when the sun started getting lower again I let the missus talk me into an early afternoon grocery run accompanied by my thirteen year old daughter who was also enjoying a bonus snow day. Still, nagged by the sense I was letting a free photo day get away from me, setting an unwanted precedence along the way, I was at least careful to bring the backpack containing my take-everywhere Iskra along for the ride. Good decision. While skies overhead were just plain bland, from the shopping centre which is much closer to the lake I could see conditions over the water were much more interesting, resembling those I had experienced a few days before when I had gone with the whole RB67 kit in tow. Though today I had only the Iskra and my captive passenger (who offered no words of protest, bless her) it seemed a return visit might be fruitful.

Part of my motivation was simple curiosity about how much things had changed out on the lake. On my first visit I was taken by surprise at how much had already frozen over after an unusually warm December. On this day the ice went out much further still so that an elevated vantage point was required just to see open water. The first thing that struck me was that the ice hills that seemed so massive only a couple days before now seemed rather flattened. This was a bit of a disappointment as on my previous visit it seemed they could easily be worked into some interesting compositions but I passed them up in favour of finding a vantage point that would allow me to include open water in the composition without undue risk of an unplanned polar bear swim. Shrunken as they now appeared the potential they seemed to have earlier was lost.

Knowing this return visit would have to be shorter (what with the attention span of teenagers these days and all) I stuck mostly to the promenade, seeing things from the same perspective I had seen them from a hundred times before, except that with the ice they were not the same things. The sky, while just as interesting, wasn't quite the same as it had been last time either, containing enough blue this time it seemed filters should effectively enhance the look whereas last time everything appeared too monochromatic for filters to matter. I carry contrast filters in my backpack too. I stuck on a nice orange one and left it there.

It was a bit off the cuff, playing with composition including sky and barren trees, sky and not quite so impressive as they were a few days ago ice hills, sky and tag along teens. Handheld shooting isn't my usual M.O. and though it didn't seem like I was likely to get any real keepers it was still feeling worth the effort of coming out. If nothing else I wanted to finally get a new roll of film through the Iskra. The one I was shooting was loaded months ago after I had improvised a few light seals to address a few leaks that had appeared and I was still unsure if the new seals were effective. As we headed back to the car I still had two frames left, which turned out to be perfect. Passing an old concrete structure I had photographed dozens of times before, a deteriorating room sized stand that had once served as a base for some sort of tower back in the amusement park days, I noticed the most unusual combination of sun behind a semi-translucent bank of cloud. The strange appearance was helped by the fact I was wearing my honey tinted polarizing sunglasses, an effect I hoped the orange contrast filter would help me match on film. A small voice inside was protesting, as it usually does, at yet another photo of that old cement thing, but from this vantage point and half buried in ice as it was the shot would be unique and the voice was once again over ruled and I used up my remaining two shots on the roll.

The result is at the top of the post. It was better than what I imagined my little return visit would result in, and I think I like it more than anything I got the first time out with the RB, its full retinue of lenses and pretty much the whole day to shoot. Of the two frames I got only the first really caught the effect I was after. By the time I shot the second that just right blend of cloud transparency and sun was already disappearing. Oh and the other good news - no sign of light leaks.

In the end any sense that I had let any opportunity slip or lost any momentum was gone. Prospects for the rest of the winter still seem pretty bright. It remains to be seen of course, but whatever the case, I'll keep you posted.

Embracing the Elements

I expect things to slow down this time of year but somehow between the holidays and getting hit with that flu that's been going around it's been a month an a half now, which I didn't expect. With both of these things winding down now that just leaves the cold to contend with. The cold is an obstacle that last year all but brought my photographic activities to a halt, but it's also an opportunity so I've vowed that this year I won't let winter stand in my way, at least not to the same degree.

Winter changes everything. At least it does where I live and for most of you living at roughly similar or higher latitudes I presume it does for you as well. The land takes on a new character. Favorite subjects you/ve photographed too many times in the past can take on a new look. Scenes that might not have looked like much amid the cluttered overgrowth of warmer seasons are transformed by the barren cold and a fresh coat of snow. Even the snow and ice itself can become the subject for photographs that exist at no other time and may never appear quite that way again.

 If you're fortunate enough to live near one of the Great Lakes, winter offers another opportunity that exists in only a few other places in the world. The Great Lakes, any of them really, are a bit like little fresh water oceans. The the lakes are vast enough to be photographed as seascapes, but being fresh water, when winters are cold enough vast quantities of ice accumulate along the shore forming temporary desolate landscapes that differ from year to year.

It must of course change quite a bit over the course of a winter, but having always lived a few minutes drive from the shore I've never really gotten the sense of how it might change on a week to week, even day to day basis. This year then I resolved to visit the shoreline throughout the winter to see how things change, and of course take advantage of whatever photographic opportunities such changes might present. Only a few days into a cold snap following a green and rainy Christmas I made my first jaunt out to the beach yesterday expecting to see little more than the first hints of a line of ice clinging to the shore. Apparently I had the whole thing figured wrong. When I arrived at my usual haunt, the stretch of shore strewn with the ruins of the old Erie Beach Amusement Park, the ice had already created a new landscape of low wind blown hills extending perhaps a hundred metres out from shore. I had been hoping for less really. I had imagined getting images that included ice and water but the new shoreline was 100 meters further on across ice I knew better than to attempt to cross however thick it might appear.

After wandering around for quite some time and making a few exposures I didn't imagine would amount to much I finally found that it was possible to follow the old concrete pier that, back in the heyday of the amusement park had received visitors arriving by boat from Buffalo NY. Here I was able to get my seascape compositions complete with ice in the foreground I had in mind. The greater than expected volume of ice at last seemed like a bit of a bonus as it gave an Antarctic feel to the scene.

I don't put much stock in long term forecasts so I'll take the winter as it comes, which is my default plan for most things anyway. In any case there is more to watch than just what happens along the Lake Erie shore. There's also the Niagara River including the Falls and all the surrounding things mist might freeze to. Then there's all the streams, creeks, woods and so on. It just takes the time and, when the temperature starts to drop, the will.