Some film in the park

[wfooshee]

Earlier this month I loaded up a roll of Velvia 100P into the F4 and headed out to my park. I was using the 70-300 ED VR. I took shooting notes but lost them, so I can't give you any info about shutter speeds, apertures, or focal lengths on these shots. Just think about setting your camera to the lowest ISO it will go to, then strapping on the longest lens you own, and you'll have an idea of where I was this day.

I wish you could all come to the house and see these projected!!!! The very act of scanning them reduces their latitude by at least half, in my own uninformed opinion. Digital just doesn't have the dynamic range to cover highlights and shadows the way nice film does....

A Great Egret wading and fishing. I remember metering this in spot mode to try to avoid blowing out the bird.


This species of dragonfly hovers long enough for even the F4 to get focused!


A Buckeye


This weed was sitting in its own little beam of sunlight along a dark, shady trail. I looked, but found no treasure around or underneath it....


A Monarch along that shady trail

Gulf Fritillary out in the sun


A snake I startled. OK, he actually startled me, because I never saw him until he shot across the trail in front of me. I barely snapped this before he disappeared into the long grass.


This Gulf Fritillary has apparently had a rough time of it!


Finally, a slightly backlit Monarch.

[Don Schaeffer]

Color is very saturated but natural. I think the weakness is in sharpness. Lovely photos though. How do you process film these days?

[wfooshee]

I think both issues, saturation and sharpness, are actually part of the scanning process. The projected slides are very pleasant. My scanner is a quite old Nikon LS-2000 film scanner, old enough to be on a SCSI interface. It's loads better than a transparency adapter on a flatbed scanner, but still, it's not very good resolution at 2700dpi (giving maybe an 8-megapixel frame) and it's a bit noisy, especially on bright images.

Regarding sharpness, keep in mind I was shooting through a 300mm f:5.6 lens on ISO 100 film, sometimes as slow as 1/125! I'm certainly not going to get past, or maybe even reach, 1/500, even in bright sunlight. Also, I'm not sure the F4 is always spot on with the auto-focus.

Once you say "I'm going to scan these slides" you open up the whole can of worms about gauging color, exposure, highlights, shadows, and so on, and trying your best to make it look like the slide itself, which will never happen.

Processing is by dropping off at the drugstore in the "send-it-off" box, from where it goes to a Fuji lab, and clearly marking the envelope as process E-6. I did have one roll get process as C-41 by some moron at the lab and got blue negatives instead of color positives, as detailed here.