Industrial Desolation pt 1

[iangreenhalgh1]

Ilford FP4 in Paterson FX-39, 1:9, 7.5mins 21C. Konica Hexanon 1.4/50 on Konica FT-1.


#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

#13

#14

#15

#16

#17

#18

#19

#20

#21

[Attila]

#7,#9 just wow! I love them!

[Selenium_27]

It feels like an old prisoner camp..

[iangreenhalgh1]

I had the same feeling too, the rusty barbed wire was what drew my attention.

[David]

#9 and #13 are fabulous work. Nicely capture, Ian.

For #19, there's a halo around the building that, I'm guessing, comes from running the unsharp mask. I get that, too, when I'm a bit over-assertive with the unsharp mask. I've managed to avoid unsharp haloing by masking off the subject to be sharpened and isolating it from the rest of the scene. Typically, that's most easily achieved by magic wanding the sky. With clouds, not as easy. But the sky is still likely the best place to go to start and then reverse your selection. With just the subject selected, you can be slightly more assertive in the unsharp sharpening. For whole-image unsharp mask use, I'm hesitant to go beyond 15% pressure and a 20-pixel radius. More than that and halos start to appear. That said, on a subject with strong, symmetrical lines, once isolated, I've used unsharp levels up to 45% or 65% with radii up to the limit (depending on image size and subject.)

I have to do this a lot for the building photos I take for work. Since I do a decent amount of architectural photography for work and the shots have to be super-sharp to be presented clearly on the HD screens in the conference room, there's a lot of sharpening.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Cheers David and thanks for that info. I applied different PP to different shots, I'm still learning what sorts of PP work best for BW film scans, there was quite a bit of grain on some of these and I played with noise reduction using the Dfine plugin from Nik and some sharpening with Nik output sharpener. I also did some adjusting of highlights and shadows, some shots had a fair bit of PP, some had very little, just a bit of noise reduction.

I've got a 30m bulk roll of this FP4+, I like the results with FX-39, nice tonal range, if a bit more grain than with TMAX100 in FX-39. I'll dev the next FP4+ roll in Fomadon LQR, see how that works, will be contrastier as it's a high contrast dev.

I should also add, light was bad for this shoot, dull and overcast, so considering that I'm pleased to get a decent result. I think I'll try to return to this subject in good light someday.

[Excalibur]

Although I lost interest in B/W about 25 years ago, I must admit B/W is ideal for sad scenes of desolation, also graveyards in cold misty conditions.

[iangreenhalgh1]

There was very little colour to capture in these scenes, just grays and browns really.

I have shot quite a lot of BW film of local churches and graveyards lately.

[Excalibur]

[iangreenhalgh1]

Those are precisely the type of derelict buildings I seek out. Up here, all you run into are sheep and barn owls.

I have had success with processing colour film into BW with silver efex plugin for photoshop. Ilford XP2 and the Kodak 400CN films that give you BW from C41 are not bad either, but for me, just taking a good colour film (Fujicolor 200) getting it processed at Asda then conversion to BW gave me really nice results, so you can do BW without developing your own film.

Another thing I'm playing with is developing Kodak and Fuji motion picture colour film in BW chemicals, I bought a huge amount of this stuff cheap, nearly 1000ft, so I hope to find a way to get good results from it, first results were promising from a short 12 shot test roll.


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[Excalibur]

Well I admire how you also create an interesting story, and I'm sure you would do the same for this derelict farm.....I visit this farm every year as it has acres of plum trees and the fruit is left to rot and on the way (to collect the fruit in my backpack) this house was complete once but someone burnt it down. erm forgot this is B/W thread, sorry it is so easy to get carried away.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Cheers, I like to try to put some meaning into these shoots, this one, obviously is about the decline and loss of industry here where I live.