Banks Lank, Spring 2013

It's already oppressively hot! But in that brief period that qualifies as "spring" in south GA, I did go out to Banks Lake for a bit of hiking and fun shooting. I shot a roll of Portra 160 and T-Max 100 with my F4, mostly to test the MB-20 battery pack I got recently. What a nice bit of kit!

Anyway, here's some snaps:

 

 

Downtown Valdosta Nightscapes - 6/1/13

Meagan and I went out Saturday night in the cool summer night to shoot some panoramas downtown for fun. I brought out my Toyo GII monorail, which for architecture and wide-angle lenses can't be beat, and shot everything with a 47mm XL lens on my Horseman 6x12 back, using some old Kodak Ektachrome 160T tungsten-balanced film:

Vertical panoramas are interesting, though the extreme perspective distortion of the lamp is probably a bit much! Nevertheless, it was fun to shoot, and a breeze to do the extreme front rise using the Toyo with bag bellows.

St. Marks NWR Part 4

Yes, I went back yet again. St. Marks is proving to be a fertile ground for photography.

I focused again on 4x5 images. They were shot with the Schneider 47mm f/5.6 XL, Nikkor 90mm f/8, Schneider Symmar-S 210mm f/5.6, or Nikkor-M 300mm f/9:

 

St. Marks NWR Part 3

I actually went to St. Marks again last Sunday with a couple of friends. I only shot a few sheets of 4x5, but it was fun nevertheless. Here's the results (the first shot is with the Nikkor 300mm f/9, the rest with the 90mm f/8):

 

 

This last one was my first-ever T-Max 400 negative. I developed it in Pyrocat HD 1:1:100 for 9 minutes. This is a classic combination recommended often, and it didn't disappoint. The grain is about as fine as T-Max in Rodinal despite being a 400-speed film. I definitely will be using it again - I honestly don't know why it took me so long to try TMY.

A Comprehensive Test of Five Nikkor Lenses in the 28mm and 35mm Focal Lengths

This is something I've been meaning to do for a while - a test between the three different 35mm and two 28mm lenses I own. Why? Well, to decide which one would be best for a typical landscape.

I simply set up my tripod in the backyard and shot frames with all of the lenses with some trees at/near infinity and looked at the center and one corner. I used my Nikon D800E. The corner doesn't match between the two different focal lengths obviously. I did a simple edit in Lightroom and applied the same edit to every photo.

I tested the lenses at full aperture (different for each lens), f/2.8, and f/8. I'm throwing out the full aperture test if the lens was faster than f/2.8 because they were all uniformly terrible.

Let's see if I can get these photos to line up okay:

                                      f/2.8                                                                                      f/8

35mm f/1.4 AI:        

35mm f/2 AF:         

35mm f/2.8 pre-AI: 

28mm f/2 AI:          

28mm f/2.8 AI-S     

Okay. Still with me? As you can see, most of the shots at f/8 look about the same. Interestingly, looking at the file size, generally speaking it corresponds with the amount of detail in the photo. Anyway - so who wins? Well, the 35mm f/1.4 definitely loses. Even at f/8 it's not that good. The one that stands out (as I expected, actually) is the 28mm f/2 AI lens. The surprise here is that the 35mm f/2.8, though dismal wide-open at f/2.8, at f/8 is quite good, easily beating the modern AF lens. I know from experience that this is a sharp lens, especially on 35mm b&w film. If I would've continued to stop down, it might've stuck out and beaten the 28mm f/2 at f/11 or f/16 (the issues of diffraction here are a topic that I won't broach in this article). The much-vaunted 28mm f/2.8 doesn't really hit the mark (and no surprise as it shines more in close-focus type shooting) and the 35mm f/2 AF-D lens really doesn't perform that well. To its credit though it did take a fall two years ago and may or may not be in 100% condition.

Now the corners are where things get interesting. If you are still interested, click on "Read more" to see the rest of my test!