I dug out my parents old Konica Autoreflex TC for the first time yesterday. It's been staring at me for a long time, but I haven't dared to try it.
I sealed the rear film door/hatch/whatever (proper english?) with electrical tape and used my Gossen meter, and the results were simply amazing. The Hexanon 40/1.8 might be the nicest lens I've ever tried.
Now, this was an ”entry level camera” at the time in 1976, but the viewfinder is large and the lens is freakin fantastic. I'd say it's probably better than the Voigtländer 40/2. Low vignetting, medium low (easy to correct) barrel distortion, sharp straight from f/1.8 and nice bokeh once you focus at a meter or two (very harsh for closeups).
I shot these with Kodak Tmax 100 @ EI 50 and developed in Fomadon R09 (Rodinal) 1:40 for 8 minutes at 20°C with one minute presoaking. Should have kept to EI 100, but it worked alright.
sebboh wrote:
it is certainly one of the best bang for your buck lenses out there with a pretty unique signature.
Yeah, the lens closest in character I can think of is the Zeiss 50/1.4. They seem to share the same softness and gritty bokeh at close distance, as well as gentle but supersharp rendering beyond 2-3 meters with very smooth bokeh. The corners are a bit funky, but it doesn't matter much to me.
Edit: The portrait of my friend Björn would be in the middle of these extremes. Very, very nice rendering at that distance.
thank you, Edward very much for your comments, I am trying the suggestions that you gave. Is the desaturation and the monotone a matter of personal choice, or does keeping all the colors in RGB indicate a mistake in scanning. Since you choose that route, i suspect not??
You and others on this form helped me decide to buy the ZI and i am really enjoying my foray into film. joanlvh
KatieInTexas wrote:
Very nice Makten! And thank you for your comments...
So, since you are in Sweden, does is automatically put the umlaut?
¿Que?
No, we have buttons for "å", "ä" and "ö" on the keyboard, since they have little in common with "a" and "o".
For example, the word "early" could have been spelled "örly" with swedish characters. "Å" is a long "o", such as in "orchestra", and "ä" is inbetween "a" and "e", such as in "fairy" or "Manchester" (if you are not scottish).
Edit: I suppose "Björn" would be spelled something like "Bjurn", "Bjirn" or "Bjiern" for english people to understand how to pronounce it.
joanlvh wrote:
thank you, Edward very much for your comments, I am trying the suggestions that you gave. Is the desaturation and the monotone a matter of personal choice, or does keeping all the colors in RGB indicate a mistake in scanning. Since you choose that route, i suspect not??
You and others on this form helped me decide to buy the ZI and i am really enjoying my foray into film. joanlvh
You're welcome!
I personally like to desaturate (saturation -100 in your favorite software) because it keeps all 3 channels, that many people believe is better for inkjet printing. The greyscale/monochrome option will convert to one channel file. There is usually a difference in tones between those two methods if you convert from a color file, but it makes absolutely no difference which you choose since you're converting a b/w scan.
I hope you're enjoying your Ikon as much as I'm enjoying mine I love this camera!
Very nice shots from everyone by the way, especially Peter Figen, Katie, Makten, jewced on the last page. Both of Peter's shots are fantastic, as are Katie's family portraits.
Makten, the ä and ö pronunciation sounds similar to German? Of course there is no Å auf Deutsch
Haha, thanks for the very enlightening response! Yo habla un poquito espanol... But it's hard as heck to type it on the iPhone with autocorrect!!
Makten wrote: ¿Que?
No, we have buttons for "å", "ä" and "ö" on the keyboard, since they have little in common with "a" and "o".
For example, the word "early" could have been spelled "örly" with swedish characters. "Å" is a long "o", such as in "orchestra", and "ä" is inbetween "a" and "e", such as in "fairy" or "Manchester" (if you are not scottish).
Edit: I suppose "Björn" would be spelled something like "Bjurn", "Bjirn" or "Bjiern" for english people to understand how to pronounce it.
Wow very nice photos on the last pages, I keep coming back to this thread.
Shot this one on my holiday in Croatia with my rolleicord on kodak 160nc, guesstimated the exposure which worked pretty well for once (probably 1s @ f/3.5)
Scanned on my canon 8800f flatbed, which is pretty bad so maybe I need to take it to someone with a good scanner before I try to get it printed.
koenrutten wrote:
Shot this one on my holiday in Croatia with my rolleicord on kodak 160nc, guesstimated the exposure which worked pretty well for once (probably 1s @ f/3.5)
Excellent!
Okay, as Peter had mentioned, here's a Velvia 50 shot which he scanned for me. The first is "as exposed" and the second shows how much detail Velvia captures in the shadows (that often requires a drum scan to open up):
"Pretty amazing what a good drum scanner and operator can do to open up the dense shadows on a slide."
After looking at that piece of film on the light box, I'm amazed that we got as much as we did out of it. There are limits to what you can do and the higher the resolution, the higher the amount of noise becomes as you try and open the shadows. For web display you can go quite a bit further and get away with it, but for high res prints, you can't. It's a matter of finding the sweet spot between acceptable noise and as much detail as possible. For images like this combining multiple exposures can work really well, and if they're on adjacent frames, you can scan them as one piece of film that will at least be perfectly aligned in one direction, making it easy to copy one and slide it over the other and mask.
