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Canon IIIa with 50mm f/1.8 Serenar and Plus-X Pan
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2011 8:15 am    Post subject: Canon IIIa with 50mm f/1.8 Serenar and Plus-X Pan Reply with quote

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.


PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 1:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

No doubt its a good lens.

However,

I am beginning to wonder with some of my cameras, even the sort-of modern SLR's, whether there are serious film curvature problems.

You may not only have a good lens, but a good camera, that holds the film flat.


PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 1:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Seems to me that film flatness would be something you could check. You could use a negative strip and load it into your camera, then remove the lens, set the shutter to "B" (or "T" if you have it), trip the shutter and keep it open with a locking cable release. Then inspect the exposed film for flatness.

I would think that any camera with a properly functioning film pressure plate would provide sufficient flatness. I do recall though, back in the early 90s apparently Contax wasn't satisfied and released the RTS III, a camera that actually sucked the film flat onto the pressure plate.

One thing about this old Plus-X Pan I'm using is it does have a rather strong curvature, and I'm thinking this is due to its age. My cameras don't seem to mind, but I've wondered about the sharpness of scans because of its curvature. But I don't scan my 35mm film anymore anyway -- except color print film. I use a slide duplicatore for my slides and b&w negatives. And the film stage for my duplicator holds the film flat. So that's good.

So, I didn't mention it above, but all the photos above are dupes of the negatives, and not scans. I used my EOS XS and a slide duplicator, and since they're just B&W, I held the duplicator up to a lamp next to my desk for exposure. WB doesn't matter, but I corrected it anyway before converting the raw images to .tif files.