thirty ghosts

another shot from my second roll in medium format. made with my seagull tlr in berlin neukölln.

one seagull does not make a summer

but a nice winter weekend…*  [this post contains a few more pictures than one]

i took out the seagull tlr last weekend for my second roll of middle-format film and this time i was more prepared than the first time.

i used a tripod for example.

my poor tripod wasn’t really up to the task carrying the quite heavy seagull but it did an amazingly good job eventually. so i now can confirm, i can get sharp pictures from this camera and i’m just incapable of doing this handheld obviously.

i try to meter with my trusty olympus e-pl1 and use it for the making-of pictures of course.

jeff barnes (still a bit underexposed)

jeff barnes (making of)

i have also improved on my digitizing process, but there is still a bit of headroom left in the complete workflow i guess. i got an acrylic plate, put the negatives on them and fired a flash from behind the plate. the result looked a lot like this:

i then inverted these shots, cropped the individual negatives and converted them to (filtered) black and white in lightroom.

here are some more pictures from my second roll.

the poor manfred…

seagull under pyramid

as you can see i’m still unsure regarding the relation of what i see in the viewfinder and where it turns out on the negative. i’d say i put the pyramid right into the middle of it but the negative says otherwise.

chrysler classic

cc (making of)

and finally a shot of the climbing frame that i did not manage to get focussed properly the first time.

and now i have a kodak portra 400 film in my pocket and i’ll see what i can do with it…

and as you can see, there are still eight pictures left of this roll to be shown, e.g. a lovely (but accidental) multiexposure.

*for the ornithologists and idiomaticists: i can tell a seagull from a swallow… ;)

preview and review

before (at least i thought so)

after(?)

expectations were high…

i got a chinese seagull 4B-1 twin lens reflex camera as a birthday present! yay! i have to admit this is really quite a tough thing to handle. about 1 kg in weight, quite clunky in my hands but it looks really cool and feels quite well built. the shutter is almost silent (i wasn’t really sure that it worked correctly).

i haven’t been able to get one sharp shot from that camera yet, though. here are two pictures from my first roll of medium film. as you can see, i forgot to remove the frame from inside the camera that allows to take pictures in 6×4,5 format (instead of the more common (and actually intended) 6×6 square format).

moreover you can see there is quite a lot of headroom in at least:

1.  choice of subject
2.  focusing skills
3.  understanding the framing of the viewfinder
4.  my digitizing skills…

in (4) i opted for handheld macro shots in front of a white computer monitor… (see the picture below) i think i could do much better e.g. by more closely following paulo ricca’s great tutorial. regarding (3) i’m quite clueless now, because i thought the first picture of the viewfinder showed the preview of the respective shot below… and this does not really make sense to me now. (2) is somewhat tricky. i was quite sure i nailed focus at least in say 5 of the 14 shots i got from the roll. but that does not seem to be the case. probably i should have used a tripod… maybe i shouldn’t have shot wide open. i have to try this out again obviously. and finally (1) we had so bad weather conditions here for at least three weeks after i got the film for the camera that one day i was tired of waiting and went out in light drizzle to the playground 50 metres away, finished the roll and went back home. there will be more and better opportunities throughout this year, i’m sure. i have two rolls b&w film left and then i think i’ll go and try colour.

quick and dirty digitizing