Black and white conversion

I've never done much black and white, but I'm coming around. I picked up some Ilford Delta 100 and went for a walk downtown with the loaner GL690. (Only a few more days till I get mine back!) The intent here was not to produce deathless art, but rather work on exposure. 

It was a bright sunny day, but mostly the shadows were not that dark because of all the reflections from the buildings. I'm pleased because the real goal was to get some detail in the shadows, and not totally lose details in the highlights, and I got that. I'll talk about this a bit more for the last two shots. However I blew the focus on one shot, much to my chagrin, because it's the shot I liked best. 7 of out 8 is a win in my books.

If you're reading this, you probably know the sunny 16 rule. It's a way of estimating exposure parameters without a light meter. Which, surprise, this camera doesn't have a light meter, and neither does mine, so I want to try to get my eyeballs calibrated for light. It goes like this, if your subject is in bright sunlight, f 16 and setting the shutter speed to the inverse of your film ISO will (usually) produce a good exposure. I only used the light meter on the last shot, the building in 8 and 9, because the difference between light and dark was quite strong. It took a while, I had to struggle with that because I'd accidentally tweaked a control. Of course there are other combinations of aperture and shutter speed that will work. You might choose differently for depth of field consideration, or tweak them depending on the exact light circumstances or the shot you have visualized or the particular film in the camera. 

Overall these are lightly edited. Some dust spots are still there but not as bad as the last scans. There are no filters on this camera, but I'll probably get a yellow one for future B&W shooting. That will help with cloud definition.

1. This is the negative, and then the positive, and I actually like the negative better. The positive is still a bit dark, and I could probably have pushed it a bit more. But there's a tiny bit of detail in the tree bark, so yay!

2.

3.

4.

5. We all know the bridge is a bright red, and I'm kind of tired of it as a subject. I wanted to see what it would look like in B&W. I really struggled with the composition for this because I'm still figuring out the frame lines in this camera. There's two sets of them because this particular camera has several lenses, though changing them is a pain. For whatever reason I got myself messed up as to which set of framelines applied to the lens I was using.

6. Reflections! And if I had the frame lines in the viewfinder figured out better, I'd have composed this slightly differently. I had no idea how this was going to look in B&W.

7. There was lots of gold in this image, which caught my eye. The right place for this composition was several yards closer to lose the light posts, but that would have put me in the middle of a busy street.

8. This is the one where I wanted to get the bit of texture detail in the light top of the building, and keep the brick detail around the S. There was full on sunlight, and lots of glare from the white walls of the construction walkway I was standing in. 

9. And the negative of 8. Again, I like this better than the positive.

There was a lovely couple sitting on a bench beside the river. I saw the shot clear as day, and asked if they minded having their photo taken. They did. Sigh. Maybe they're in the middle of an affair and they're afraid I'm a PI and the photos would be used as evidence. Except a PI wouldn't have asked.

All in all I'm quite pleased with these. It was a beautiful day for a walk, the photos turned out nicely, and the scan process is getting better. It's still a bit of a jury rigged affair. The hardest part is getting the camera in exactly the right place above the light pad. For those that care about the scanning process, the settings were ISO 100, f4, 1/50.

I've got a couple more rolls, and I'm wondering if I should try to run them through this camera. I want to see what the Ektar 100 looks like in medium format because I was a bit disappointed with it in 35mm. Then again, I slightly underexposed it, and it wasn't bright and sunny, which is where Ektar shines. I'd like to try some night shooting with it, and with the roll of Cinestill 800T I picked up. If you've got any questions about the GL690, ask quick, I only have it till Tuesday. Stay tuned!