Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2011 8:15 am Post subject: Canon IIIa with 50mm f/1.8 Serenar and Plus-X Pan |
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cooltouch wrote:
I haven't been shooting much with my Canon RF recently so I decided to do something about that yesterday. I finally found a halfway photogenic access to a creek close to my house, and decided to take my Canon IIIa along and shoot some B&W images of the creek and its environs.
Here's the camera:
There is a long, winding and irregular set of steps leading down to the creek bottom. And lots of old trees growing alongside the creek.
I got to playing around with various filters, trying to get a "look" to a few of my exposures the way I wanted it. Stumbled across the "Threshold" setting in Paint Shop Pro, and found that I really liked the effect I could get with it.
I probably wouldn't have done much playing around at all, but my negatives came out very thin this time and all the shots required quite a bit of adjustment to get them to look okay. Mostly curves, some basic brightness and contrast, but a few were tricky to get to look right. It was while I was doing all this -- basically trying anything that might help -- that I ran across the Threshold setting.
One of the things I didn't have to do was sharpen the images. The more I use this 50mm f/1.8 Serenar, the more impressed I am by its performance. Its center sharpness is probably as good as the best normal lenses I've used. In a separate post, I'm showing a few close-ups I shot with this 50 Serenar and my DSLR. Check it out in the Manual Focus Lenses section.
I need to figure out what I did wrong with the developing of this film. I know it was exposed accurately -- the meter I used, I use often. As I mentioned above, the negatives came out very thin. The film is some really old Kodak Plus-X Pan. It expired in 1983 and has been in the freezer for almost the entire time since it expired. I still have about a dozen rolls of it left, so I need to figure out what went wrong with this roll. In the past, I developed the film using Kodak D76 full strength and Kodak Professional Fixer and got good depth to the negatives. This time, though, I developed it 1:1 and followed the increased times. I'm still using the original fixer and I'm wondering if that might be the problem, but I doubt it. I developed some fresh 400TX using it just about a week ago, and that roll came out great. So . . . It seems to me that, either I finally came across a bad roll out of the lot, or that I should increase my developing time even more if I'm gonna do 1:1 with the D76 and this old film.
If you have any ideas, let me know. I can post a few of the negatives' images also if you think it might help. _________________ Michael
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