A KiwiRetrospective ~

Ordinarily you wouldn’t go to the beach in mid winter when its -2 degrees Celsius at eight o’clock in the morning. However it was a nice day, I haven’t been able to get out with the cameras for a few weeks, totally normal of course for this time of year, being as its mid winter here.

Both my wife and I have had a hankering for some fresh seafood for a time now, so what better excuse to head to the west coast and visit the craft shops and have lunch at the wharf in Raglan. The seafood here doesn’t get any fresher than straight off the boat and into the fishing company chillers right next door.

By the time we had organised ourselves and the day had warmed up sufficiently lunch at the wharf turned into a mid afternoon feast. This also meant that the available light was going to be very contrasty, low level and bright.

I had two cameras with me, the Pentax MZ-6 and the Fuji HS20. The film will go to the lab tomorrow, mean time I have finished PP’ing a batch of photos which you can see here.

Considering the conditions I set the HS20 in EXR DR mode, auto ISO 400 and Auto DR 400, and adjusted Ev to suit each shot. I have to say that a APSC or Full frame camera would have handled the variations in dynamic range with a greater amount of ease but the HS20 did pretty well and in a lot of the images very little PP work was required.

In some cases the light was so difficult I had to consider other options. This is where Fuji cameras excel and the others generally dont. I’m referring to the onboard film simulations and filters. For this particular occasion I reached for the film simulations, choosing Black & White and Sepia. In fact the Sepia was the better of the two, holding the dynamic range and detail better the the B&W.  While Sepia isn’t to everyone’s liking its an often overlooked option and gives considerably better Post Processing results in many cases. In my early days of photography we used to print the portrait images in Sepia before they went to the colourists to have the final colour blending done.

Hand colouring or tinting photos was my original introduction to colour photography in the portrait studio and something I was expected to become moderately proficient at.  I was never anything near as good a the ladies we had doing it full time. It was astonishing how good they could get a photo to look just from the photographers notes.

All the following images were shot with the HS20 and edited in Photscape 3.7, which I have now running in a virtual box. More on Linux and virtual box to come at a later time. These images can also be viewed here if the displayed image is too large for your screen. Google Photo Collection

Fish and chips at the wharf

There was a third camera we had with us, namely the Samsung Note 9 and while we didnt use it a great deal I will add the photos from the Note 9 later in the week. Its fast becoming the go to camera of the moment.

For those interested in the Note 9 as a camera, check out this video and others like it on YouTube.

As always: Happy Snapp’n

Regular visitors here will have followed the digital Darkroom series I recently completed ( You can find the links in the side bar or main menu listings) , the start of which was talking about what you need when editing using a PC or Laptop. My preference will always be for a desktop PC although I do have one of the latest Samsung tablets as well that I can use for mobile photography. Having an ergonomic or comfortable desk is very much as important as the computer you use. In my case I was using a compact corner unit desk I built some time ago, however I have never been a fan of having a sizeable PC case taking up desktop realestate.

With than in mind I jumped on YouTube to see what I could find. I found this.

I knew straight away this was the design I would use as the basis for my new desk. I elected to leave out the extra drawer that is shown in the video as this helped keep the height of the top of the table exactly where I wanted it. As the components I use to power my i5 based editing rig included a full height video card and a larger than standard CPU cooler I needed to make the componentry drawer deeper.

I also flush mounted a 22 mm momentary switch into the front face of the drawer, and it sits about 1 mm higher than the panel face to make it easy to press. Thats it, no extra led or anything needed. I dont need power leds or hardrive leds, its pretty obvious if the PC isn’t running.

The table top is made from five 150 mm x 20 mm Macrocarpa boards and is 1800 mm in length with a depth of 650 mm. Framing

and legs are made from American White Oak and are tapered to give the whole thing a slight retro look. I liked the knot detail in the wood so much I choose to finish the top with semi gloss water based poly. Four coats in all. Now I have a much better work surface and it no longer feels crowded and cramped when I’m using it. As I had all the component parts in stock this cost me nothing but time to finish.

You could build your own desk like this very cheaply with some ply or even MDF and paint finish the project.

As always, Happy Snappin’

Today I’ve been processing some of the negatives from my latest roll of 35mm films. Developed and scanned for me by Imageland in Frankton, Hamilton NZ.  I usually get their standard scans as they are always good. They do offer other services but I usually opt just for develop & scan with the scans uploaded for me to access from my desktop and pickup of the negatives later as I’m in the area. All very convenient

There was a few images from a trip to Mount Maunganui some months back. At that time I had the standard Pentax 28-90 kit lens on the camera for that trip and the difference between the new Tamron and the older kit lens was evident, with images generally being a little sharper  from the Tamron lens. The first two images are taken with the Pentax lens. Both images were processed using Photoscape and have had a film sim filter applied, with a gentle sharpen and noise reduction.

The following image was taken on a rather poor day weather wise with the light not being particularly good under the trees and as a result poor colour is seen in the image where in reality the colour of the fallen leaves and those on the branches were in fact a great deal brighter.

I was using Kodak Ultramax 400, a medium speed film for these images and I have to say I’m not overly happy with the colour of this particular roll of film. I think I will have to try Kodak Colour Plus 200 which seems to have better colour reproduction. Fortunately with the ability to apply Colour Filters that simulate the look of well know film stock I have been able to gain back some of the colour in the images.

In the above images two have been colour corrected, the other two ( The wading bird & my wife taking a photo ) have been left as shot although some other post processing has been done, mainly a light sharpen and noise reduction, which is usually necessary when working with scanned images. Noise reduction done carefully should leave a small amount of  film grain visible. This grain is even less evident when the images are printed. The final image is from one of the corrected images above printed onto A4 High Gloss Canon Photo Print paper. The image below was taken with my Samsung J3pro, which is good enough to show that the final print is more than adequate for printing at A4 at 300 dpi. Printing larger would also be fine at A3 at 240 dpi. Colour correction in the image was more in line with what I was seeing from both the Note 9 and the HS20.

Having seen the resulting output from my printer I’m more than happy with what my film camera is producing and it now remains to be seen what the rest of the photos look like. Theres approx 16 images on a second roll of film from our day out around the Hauraki Gulf. These images are sitting on a roll of Fuji Superior Xtra 400/24.  Most of those mages are from the Burke Street Wharf area in Thames and it will be interesting to compare the two film stocks against the Fuji files from my HS20 which was set to Astia as the film simulation. Stay tuned more to come.

Happy Snappin’

Two recent trips have seen us at both the west coast at Kawhia. and visiting the Seabird Coast, the rocky shore line at Kaiaua   and Thames in the Hauraki Gulf.

The Note 9 is very good at doing panoramas and is something my wife enjoys creating. The first two images below are of the bike fence at Oparau and looking west towards Australia from the top of the sand dunes on the west coast just out of Kawhia, I even managed to insert myself in the image, completely unintentionally of course.

The last seven images in this set are all taken around the Kaiaua & Seabird Coast areas. Two remarkably different areas within ten kilometres of each other. The rocky shore line at Kaiaua has to be seen to be appreciated.

All the images seen in this first set from the Note 9 are unprocessed direct from the camera.

We had two other cameras with us as well as the Note 9, namely the venerable Fuji HS20 EXR and the even older Pentax MZ-6 sporting the ( new to me ) The Tamron AF 28-300 mm f/3.5-6.3 XR Di LD Aspherical (IF) Macro Lens. Currently the film is away being developed and scanned and hopefully I will have some results this coming week.

While I wait for the film to be processed I have started to process some of the HS20 imagery. The conditions for the day were very bright clear and sunny which was a bit of a pain as it made everything very contrasty with deep shadows, typical for this time of year (winter).

I shot a series of images in both Colour and Black & White using Astia for the colour so as not to over-saturate the images and the B&W film sim for the others. As always Fuji includes some nice film simulations in their cameras and the HS20 is no exception to this.

The image of the old wharf to the right ( colour image) shows a little too much purple in the sky, it seems I may need to change the colour curve a little and get it back to a more natural look. After seeing this result I decided to try a sepia toned edit which I really like. I could have shot this as sepia in camera but I prefer to use the sepia settings in Photoscape as it seems to be more balanced between highlights and shadows. The Sepia film sim in the HS20 seems a little too lacklustre for my taste, therefore I generally convert from the colour image when using this process. This middle image was shot as B&W in camera and all thats been changes is a little more contrast.

In the image above I have cropped the photo slightly and processed the image using the AF2 middle film simulation in Photoscape. In the image below which was one of two identical images the overwhelming blue haze makes the highlights in the sky difficult to see. By using the AF2 process we create a more retro feel to the image while bringing out more of the highlight detail. As with all these HS20 images they are shot in Jpeg only in EXR DR mode with the dynamic range set to auto DR 400%.

Once the film images have been processed I will set them in Galleries to view so that they can be compared image for image.

The image above is somewhat overblown in the highlights making it difficult to process. Being a Jpeg there isn’t much headroom to try to bring back highlights. However converting to a Sepia toned image increases contrast and provides a fraction more detail while imparting a somewhat retro feel to the image. Its a good image in that it shows the harshness of the light and the amount of blue in the atmosphere.

More to come later …

Happy Snappin’