Pushing Arista Premium (Kodak Tri-x) 400 to 1600
One of my goals for my photography is to present a more objective image rather than a subjective image. To my mind, b&w photography does that for me. I also want to be able to shoot candids in low light without the use of flash. Film to my eye has many more subtle gradations between black and white than digital. It has the look I’m trying to capture. But iso 400 isn’t fast enough to allow me to do the photography that I want in low light.
So I’ve started on a mission to find the right combination of camera, film and developing to give me the results I want in a small, easy-to-carry package. And I think I have the right film and developer now. Here’s a shot of a couple of friends in a dimly-lit restaurant. I used my Nikon N80 and a 50mm f=1.8 AF-D lens loaded with Arista Premium 400 pushed to 1600.
I developed the film in Kodak D-76 diluted 1+1 for 13:15 at 21 degrees. I’ve got good details, smooth gradations and the grain is under control. This is as dark as I would normally want to shoot and this combination has delivered the goods.
I love my N80, its compact, lightweight and has a ton of modern features that help me get the shots I want. I can select spot, matrix or center-weighted metering with my thumb without having to look away from the viewfinder. I can select any of 5 different focus points and the spot meter will meter off that point. In shooting candids in low light, a spot meter is your best bet because there are bound to be a lot of bright lights in the background trying to fool a meter.
Another great feature of the N80 is the 1/4000th shutter speed. Most of my old manual cameras have either a 1/500th or 1/1000th shutter speed. If I rate my film at 1600, that means I need to have at least a 1/2000th shutter speed to shoot that speed outdoors. The N80 gives me some flexibility to do just that.
I’ve started a gallery with sample shots of Arista Premium pushed to 1600, you can see all the shots here.
Read MoreWide angle portraits
The normal focal length for portraits is 75mm to 150mm. The reason for this is telephoto lenses compress the features of your subject and make noses and ears look more proportional. Your subject looks better, so you’re a better photographer. Believe me, most people will rate your photography by how good they look when you photograph them, not by any true aesthetic value. But you can use a wide angle lens for portraits, you just have to make sure you don’t get too close to your subject. The closer you get to your subject, the more exaggerated their features will become.
Also you don’t want to have things like hands or feet closer to the camera than the rest of them. That will make their hands look huge. As you can see in the portrait below, which was shot at 35mm, my muse’s hands run parallel to the focal plane of the camera, making them proportional.
Using a wide angle is a great way to show a person in the context of their life. Most photojournalists prefer wider angles to tell a story in context. The best focal length is 28 or 35mm. 24 is a bit wide and it begins to distort features. Here’s a 28mm below, you can see her face starting to lengthen in comparison to the above, but its still not too distracting.
These were shot on my full frame D700, so if your shooting on a smaller frame DX or APC sensor you’d have to reduce the focal length appropriately.
Read MoreNew portrait of my muse
I just finished developing and scanning a roll that had been in my Nikon N80 for a while. I was experimenting with the pop-up flash and had the lens wide open. This is kind of an interesting effect and it is exactly as it came from the film, no photoshopping. The film is Kodak Tri-X400.
The flash was set on balanced fill so it just paints her face with light. It brings lots of contrast to the picture. It also puts a little speck of light in each eye. In the business these are called catch lights because the eyes catch the light. A little bit of fill flash can add some drama to black and white.
Read MoreShooting the moon
Did you ever notice when you take a picture of the moon, it always looks smaller in the resulting image than it does when you see the scene without the camera? I don’t know why it is unless the eye or brain creates some kind of telephoto effect. Here’s a shot of the moon that I took with a 50mm lens. The 50mm lens has long been regarded as the closest to your own eye’s perspective.
See how small the moon looks in relation to the roof? When I saw the scene before I put up the camera to my eye, I could swear it was bigger (that’s what she said!). But I take the shot and it doesn’t fill up the scene like it does in my mind’s eye.
Okay, now here’s another scene I shot on the Salton Sea in California. This was shot with a 105mm lens on a 1.5 crop dslr giving it an effective focal length of 157mm. Now this looks closer to what I saw with my naked eye that evening. The proportion of the moon is equal to the proportion of the mountain as I saw it. That means the real effective perspective of the eye is closer to 150 than 50.
This was shot across the width of the entire sea, so the mountains had to be a least a mile away. That makes a big difference too. The further away you are from the foreground object, the larger the moon will appear in relation to the object.
Want a big moon in your picture? Use a lot of lens. Here is a shot I did of the moon using a Canon T2i with a Nikon 300mm 4.5 ais lens plus a 2x teleconverter. With a 1.6 crop sensor the focal length is an effective 960mm on an 18 megapixel body. Lots of detail.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the moon is in bright sunlight. The rest of your scene probably isn’t. That means to get detail in the moon and in your scene, you’re going to need to make two shots, one at full daylight setting and one at the setting for the rest of the scene. Then you can use the magic of Photoshop to composite the two images. That’s how I created the second shot. If I shot just the scene, the moon was too bright and it was just a white dot. If I shot just the moon, the rest of the scene was too dark. I had to shoot it twice to get the scene as my eye saw it. No camera has a dynamic range equal to your eye.
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