Working on these was a struggle. Lightroom kept crashing while I was spotting dust, and there was a lot of dust. I think it was the confluence of several factors: I had a bazillion desktop apps open, and like the title says, these are scanned from huge negatives, at a really high DPI. They’re 400MB tiffs. So, I closed a bunch of the apps I had open and then it started working better.
I’ve been hanging around SFMOMA quite a lot these days, just because I can. They have good wifi and good coffee, and I have a membership; I think it’s 125 or 150 a year, and I get in for free as many times as I want. Really an excellent deal. As much anxiety as showing my own work in galleries gives me, I do love just hanging out in them.
I’m not sure how much longer this film project is going to last. I’m already tired of spotting out dust from things. It’s hard to get the same tonality from digital. Most of these pictures would actually be HDR shots; if you shot at low ISO and underexposed a stop or so, it’d work. Maybe.
I took another look at the Leica work from when I rented that one in December, and I might have to get one. There were some nice things there that I overlooked, and I may have been too hasty in dismissing it. There’ll be a whole post about that soon, because I also really like shooting with the CLE. I’m just not sure it’ll make it to permanent use, because film is kind of a pain in the ass.
Posted on 2018-05-25T06:55:14Z GMT
I dunno. Haven’t blogged in almost a week, but the backlog is still low. Shooting film is super slow, what can I say? I’ve got some rolls to develop sitting here right now; and a bunch of stuff scanned that I need to get spotted.
Also, this isn’t my only project… I’m once again wearing many hats. Well, at least one, with a Cubs’ logo on it.
Posted on 2018-05-22T05:02:02Z GMT
Did a bunch of film scans this evening, and I have to say I’m not super happy with what I’m getting from the 35mm work. I’m going to go through the motions of developing what I’ve already shot and looking at it honestly, but I’m not super positive about it. A lot of the things I like from the work coming out of the 6x9 camera just aren’t there in the smaller format. Maybe the 40mm 1.4 will be the silver bullet to make it all magical again, but I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, here are three images off the queue. I don’t think they’re related at all, or even shot within a month of each other.
Posted on 2018-05-14T08:43:11Z GMT
These were from the first batch I did here at home, and they have a ton of dust and water spots (partially because my basement is dusty, and partially because I don’t have anything to clean them with prior to scanning). A little cleanup and they’re presentable. The last image in particular, was pretty hard to work on; I thought for a minute there might be starts in the background, but no, it was just dust that happened to look like a familiar constellation.
Need to scan more… I’ve got four pages of 35mm work ready to be scanned. Maybe tomorrow night? Friday night? One of them is the first roll through the new camera, shooting with the 50mm Canon lens I’ve had for better than a decade (and is itself a decade older than me, at least). Looking forward to seeing how those look.
This particular night we were mostly playing games, but I had the film camera and found a few moments, between things and on a pizza pickup run, to get a few photos in. That seems to be the way I work now; photos when I’m not doing anything else that requires my attention. It’s the background process that’s always running. Still, always looking.
Still trying to do a post a day; at the end of the month, we’ll see how I did without a backlog. Here’s today.
you can’t see it, but fletch is showing off a twiddler, an absurd input device that I’m super tempted to get. 
Beers that don’t like being poured. 
The fog all rolled in.
Posted on 2018-05-10T05:52:42Z GMT
