In The Zone: The General Photography Tips, Advice & Shop Talk Thread

[Robocon^^]

If you got graininess and gray blacks, it sounds like underexposure.

What settings were you shooting at? Exposure time and aperature?

You'll need to experiment and bracket your shots and take notes on what settings you used.

To give my nightshots the best chance of working I use slow film and the smallest aperature. This extends the exposure time, but it gives you more leeway so you don't need to be as precise timing the exposure--I'm talking upwards of 30 seconds to several minutes (or even hours in superdarkness or recording star trails out in the boonies)

Try switching to 100 speed film. Find a suitable area with various types of lighting (streetlamps, incandescent, fluorescent, neon) and shoot a series of exposures. 15 sec, 30 sec, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4 min, 8 min, etc. Shoot in various situations, you'll be amazed how much color and information that gets recorded in lowlight long exposure (so long as the tripod stays rock solid)

Google "night photography" and you'll get a ton of pics and how-to info.

[remotecontrolalligator]

my stank-ass nikon n6006 only lets me go up to 30seconds sounds like i was on the right track, just limited by my camera. that's good to know.

as far as the other settings. the n6006 is aa full auto SLR, but you can control the exposure and the fstops (is that the apurateure?) manually, but i don't know enough about the fstop BS to play around with. i guess i'll have to futz around some more to get the desired effects.

thanks for the help!

[Robocon^^]

Yeah, if 30 seconds is your max, you'll need to take control of the f-stops. The smaller the number the bigger the opening which will let in more light. 30 seconds is plenty of exposure time to do night photography as long as you configure the camera to let in more light.

[remotecontrolalligator]

AWESOME, thanks again!

[wonki wonki]

anyone here with experience developing Ilford Delta 3200 Professional? I'm shooting it at ISO 1600. i'm wondering if people have had good results just following the development times outlined in the datasheet...

[djbadmonkey]

wonki and i went on a shoot yesterday in downtown LA. it was pretty great. the theme was "the architecture of downtown LA" and we spent the day traipsing around downtown. yesterday was a festival, and i forget which one, and it was full of thousands of people. the maggi chicken was there, that was a personal highlight. but it was hard to take pictures of buildings when you had so many great people pics around. but we persevered and printed some interesting photos. neither one of us have a scanner so i'm not sure when we can get some up.

i liked my pics of the broadway mall and the Los Angeles Theatre facade. also, there's this fuckin awesome alley and i think it's called...hmmm. i forget. but it was really cool and crazy. it's a national landmark.

my first impression of fuji neopan acros 100: good film, great grain, solid blacks. it's a little faster than a typical 100asa, maybe shooting it at 125 is the key.

oh and also, eating at "ye olde taco house #1" was an experience.

[wonki wonki]

my random thoughts on sunday's traipsing, and other unrelated stuff:

- fiesta de Broadway (?) was awesome. but we weren't on a street/people photography assignment, and i think djbm and i exercised a lot of self-restraint in focusing on architecture. (djbm got a lttle TOO excited about the chicken-costume though.)

- most of the architectural shots we encountered in full sun had contrast ranges too long to fit on flim. if i had development control of individual negatives, i would overexpose then underdevelop as needed to get all the details on film, but... what i'll try next time is to pre-expose the negatives on zone II and try to compress the contrast range.

- the alley was the site of the st. vincent's college.

- i don't know about shooting the neopan 100 at 125. you're going to lose even more shadow detail, no? how about just cut down the development time by 30s.

- the other day i made some prints from ilford delta 3200 (shot at iso 1600). came out nice. nice grains and great shadow details. i'll do some comparisons with neopan 1600 soon, but delta 3200 is looking mighty good right now.

- ye olde taco house #1 is great. $1.50 tacos but they are easily twice the size of regular tacos, if not more. good deal!

[wonki wonki]

i'll try to get some scanned in...

...

we got a little scared off by the size of the crowd surrounding the taco place in the Market, so we went down the street. hehe.

[skimmilk]

Anyone have any tips for infra-red film? What kind of filter I should use? I hear you should always overexpose infra-red film...true?

Thanks

[Margin Walker]

Re: Infrared film. I've never used it, but the film is very sensitive to light. I've been told that you need to load the film in complete darkness (that means no darkroom lights either). The reason is because light will leak through the canister's felt and fog the film. I know that seems far-fetched, but considering the film can capture lightwaves beyond what the human eye can percieve it'd be worth it to do so all the same. If you don't have a darkroom handy, use a changing bag or a bathroom (closets leak too much light) with a towel stuffed underneath the door. Once the film's loaded, you're probably good to go as most cameras have pretty leak-proof backs.

The over-exposure advice is probably spot on as the prints come out very grainy and aenimic-looking. Moreover, infrared film has a ghostly, ethereal feel to it and those moods are best captured in the early morning and late evening. Because red/orange hues are weaker than blue hues, they can only make it through the Earth's atmosphere at dawn and dusk when the sun's rays come in at an angle. Hence orange & red sunrises & sunsets. And because infrared film primarily captures those wavelengths, it's best to shoot at dawn/dusk with lenghty exposures.

[wonki wonki]

ahem,

the red/orange rays make it fine through the atmosphere. also, if you consider the path taken by the sun's ray at sunrise/sunset, you'll see that light has to travel through a lot more of the atmosphere than if it was coming more or less straight down as it does at noon. the atmosphere scatters bluish light more than it does longer wavelengths (red end of the spectrum), hence the blue sky. at sunrise/sunset, there is even more scattering of blue light from the sun due to the fact that the rays are travelling through more atmosphere, and what's left over coming from the sun's direction is very reddish.

the issue with over-exposing infra-red films has to do with metering. your camera's meter does not know what kind of film you are using (aside from setting the ISO speed). it's not aware that the film is sensitive to infrared/red light. so in most situations when the meter looks at a certain scene, it thinks there is a lot of available light, even though the amount of light that will be recorded on film is a small fraction of that. hence the possible need to over-expose. this of course depends on what filters you are using, etc.

i'd check out the discussion from photo.net at http://www.photo.net/photo/edscott/spectsel as well as look into metering recommendations for individual films to get an idea of how to expose these guys.

[skimmilk]

thanks for the info margin walker and wonki wonki...i'll check out the website.

[Robocon^^]

I've seen samples of infrared images shot in daytime, so I don't believe you need to wait for twilight or get up at the crack of dawn.

They make special filters that block out daylight and only let infrared in. I know this is one way to shoot infrared with a digital camera. To test if your digicam can do it, just point a TV remote control at the camera and see if it records the blip.

[wonki wonki]

Originally posted by Aaron
I've always wanted to shoot the jail in downtown LA. That building fascinates me, especially at night.
Are you guys gonna post any pictures?

Also, try the taco place in Grand Central Market. $1.50 or $1.75 for chicken tacos that are almost the size of a burrito. I'm almost always full after 1 taco.

here are some scans from the downtown la jaunt. scan quality isn't very good. most of the dust specks are from the scan, not the neg or the print. also note all the compression artifacts and the moire patterns.. eck.


the grand central building - downtown la.
film: ilford pro delta 3200, shot at iso 1600
yellow filter #8 (in addition to skylight 1A filter for all pics)
i placed the shadow underneath the main archway on zone II



the new disney center
film: ilford pro delta 3200, shot at iso 1600
red filter #25
darkest shadows between the 'leaves' were placed on zone I-1/2. the sky fell on zones IV - V. the reflection from the sun still blew out though; it was hard to contain it.



biltmore hotel from pershing square
film: kodak 400TX (Tri-X), shot at iso 400
red filter #25
shadows between the wings of the biltmore hotel on zone II. the sky fell on zone VI i think. i printed it too dark, and there is no detail in the foreground trees at all, although there is some in the neg that can be brought out. i'm wondering if i should dodge that area or flash the paper to compress the contrast scale? i'll probably try printing again with contrast filter #1 or #1-1/2.



by the way, all these were printed on kodak polymax RC paper and given normal development in dektol.

anyway, there are a couple more photos if people are interested in seeing them, shot with the delta 3200 film...

[wonki wonki]

the disney center was shot from across the street, probably around 40mm, don't remember. it's kinda hard to discern the perspective from the photo because the building is so unusual.. also, the "compressed" look is probably due to the depth of focus. i was at f16 and focused at the hyperfocal distance.

i scanned the print on a hp flatbed in the campus library. i'm not sure what the model was, but the glass was really dirty.

...

forgot to mention, i also had the cir-pol filter on, aligned horizontally. (the sun was setting to the left of the frame.)