Yeah… I’m slow.

I didn’t intend on leaving this blog sit for so long. I’ve been unexpectedly busy and generally burnt-out, leaving me with little time for photography… and the time I have spent with it has not been very fulfilling. Oh well…

In any case, I figured an update was due. No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog, and I haven’t ditched it. It’s just been on the back burner. There are several unfinished articles coming up, including a full XD-11 review.

So, on a more positive note, I finally got my last roll of Velvia 50 back, which I shot over the latter part of autumn. Lots of cool stuff, though, I haven’t had a chance to look anything over with a loupe yet. Those will be showing up on my flickr as I get them scanned and processed.

Slide film is a beauty to behold… but the scans are not. So, it’s a real challenge to get the scans to come anywhere close to the originals. I see low-contrast and low-saturation slide shots on flickr all the time from bad scanning/processing (most slide film in inherently med/high in both contrast and saturation). This makes me sad. A bit of work and know-how can really bring to life the dead looking digital version. I’ll eventually get around to documenting the process as I get better at it. In the meantime, expect a more general tutorial on using the curves tool found in almost any serious image editor — seriously the best digital post-processing tool you can have (beyond crop/rotate, of course).

Lastly, here’s a semi-recent shot.

Lost. again.
Minolta XD-11, 28mm MC Rokkor-X f2.5.
Ilford HP5+ @ 3200 in Rodinal 1+100, 2 hours, stand.

While I got decent scans, the negatives were still rather thin looking. Really grainy, as I expected… but contrast in the scans look good. If I try pushed HP5 with Rodinal again, I’ll either go for a more traditional development process or a stand development with a higher concentration (maybe 1:50). I’ve got 1 more roll of HP5+… but I may go back to Tri-X for a while. Still have a bunch of Tmax 100 and 400 too, but I can’t say I’m a huge fan. I’ve got a roll of Tmax 100 I’m going to try in Rodinal when I finish it. That should be interesting.