I am under the weather, enough that I didn't step outside until after 5:30pm. But, I got a call saying it was 58 degrees outside which is absurdly warm. So, I poked my head out and saw some clouds. Good clouds.

I made a call and headed down to Providence International Airport (TF Green Airport). We shot some portraits with and without airplane. We shot with and without artificial light. According to the file time we spent 18 minutes shooting and moving around. Considering this included the opening of a hanger, dragging out a plane, returning the plane, closing the hangar, and two additional locations on the tarmac, we worked pretty fast. Didn't feel rushed though, just kept moving.

These shots don't have a home yet, but they will likely end up on something involving Horizon Aviation or maybe I'll contact the Airport Corporation (I need to get in touch with them). The pictures are pretty much as shot out of the camera, cropped and such. The only modification was of the ground in one spot where it was ugly.

Mark at Midstate camera has a knack for names, voices, and faces. I couldn't pull a fast one on him even if I wanted to; he remembers who I am (it's a little eery - the first time I called after meeting him, he knew my voice).

Yet, someone may have been trying to pull his chain:

I stopped by for the first time in months to take a look at the array of old stuff on the used camera table. Apparently someone had bought and returned a Soligor 21mm f3.8 Nikon F mount manual focus lens. The buyer claimed that it was soft right down the middle, but there is no apparent haze on the glass. So Mark asked me to check it out (with many caveats about not wasting time on it, and only if you have the film loaded already, etc etc_). It's a $75 lens, offbrand, non-ai (for those who know what that means), expectations are not high. But, soft down the middle seems extreme as well.

I don't own a 21mm prime, so a chance to fool around sounded alright. I got home, mounted it on a recently purchased Nikon F2 manual focus camera, and headed out the door. The camera with 21mm lens looks pretty swanky, despite its lack of market value.

As a walked in the door of my target, the Rhode Island Rock Gym (a client), I set about metering the light. With the lens wide open I would be shooting 1/15th of a second shutter speed with ISO400 ultra color Kodak film. Not very fast. But, with a wide lens, maybe fast enough. (In truth it wouldn't be fast enough because I'm testing a lens for sharpness with a super long shutter speed - but I guess we see what we want to see).

Thankfully, before I wasted my film, one of the climbers (Nate) joked I should come with him to Lincoln Woods. It took me two seconds to decide to follow him out the door. I met his Tyler and we were off.

I spent the rest of the afternoon shooting a single roll of film at f8, f11, and f16 at 1/250th, 1/125th, and 1/60th respectively. I was stacking the odds in my favor by not shooting wide open on the lens. This lens won't be sharpest wide open and so stopping it down a few stops would be the best it was going to do.

21mm is wide, but not as wide as I imagined in my head. Interestingly this lens is somewhat close to rectilinear. I had expected more of a "fisheye" look because it is a cheap lens, but it did a decent job.

I poked around here and there on "max-traverse, the warm-up area, the wave" and a couple of other named bouldering locations. I wanted maximum depth of field, so I shot using the hyperfocal distance method.

37 exposures and done, I took the film to the CVS nearby and dropped off the film. Their lab is open until 8:30, which surprised me. I wasn't going for pro-lab development largely because the setup is so experimental anyway. That and I would scan the images direct from film if they looked promising.

Conclusions

The results are as you see them, scanned from prints. Kodak paper, Noritsu printer, UC 400 film. Is the lens sharp? Eh. Sharp enough that I wouldn't call it soft down the middle. The sharpness was better than I anticipated, but I was surprised by a different aspect of the results. The pictures don't have much color "pop." The lens didn't do a great job of transmitting color. It may be my exposure (aiming for the middle of the road in the contrasty situation). It may be the printing (it's a CVS, the bar is not high). But, I expected more out of the Ultra Color 400 than I was getting terms of color saturation. Note: These scans have been adjusted for black point which seems to help a great deal.

This is a little discussed topic, except in the rarified air of online forums, but the quality of lenses is measured, in a large part, by their ability to transmit color. Without a polarizing filter, in harsh sun, internal reflection and lack of lens coating probably reduced the color transmission and saturation. The material of the glass itself may have introduced chromatic aberration further reducing color accuracy.

Exposure and printing certainly played their part. But, in the end, the lens is not a superstar. Is it $75 worth of lens? Sure. It seems to have the angle of view (equivalent to a 21mm focal length on the lens). It does focus correctly. Stopped down I can see small details. Is it, as my friend Mark (not the store owner) would say, "auto-good?" No, it won't automatically make your images more interesting. If anything, you will need to use technique to your advantage to get the most out of it. You probably will need to use its flaws (such as flare problems) to your advantage and go for the "look."

Before there was digital, there was Polaroid. But this isn't a woeful remembrance of the past. I've been on the lookout for an inexpensive Polaroid back for the Hasselblad for a while. If you are unfamiliar, unlike traditional 35mm cameras that can only shoot one roll at a time, a Hasselblad camera can change the cartridge that holds the film at any time. This allows you to switch from shooting B&W film to color in a just a couple of seconds, and more importantly, allows you to go back to the first roll without rewinding and starting all over.

So, what's the connection? Well Polaroid and others made film holders that could mount on the Hasselblad and other "system" cameras that allowed you to switch films in and out. In the days before digital, this is how you got to see just what you were shooting without going to get the film developed. Or so I thought anyway. $10 spent at Hunt's, and some film, and I got to find out (it's amazing how cheap a Polaroid back is now - $75 easy just 6 months ago on Ebay).

I was under the impression that Polaroid, like any other film, had a known ISO (or film speed) that could be used to determine the correct exposure for a given scene. So, I could shoot first in Polaroid to judge exposure, then shoot film knowing I was going to be 95% correct. But, I was wrong.

All those professional fashion and studio photographers we used to see on TV shooting hundreds of Polaroids on set are much more sophisticated than I. They weren't worrying about the right exposure per se; they could get that from traditional metering. They were worried about the composition and lighting ratios. The aha! moment for me.

Because I am still at a point where I worry about straight exposure first, I had created a fiction in my head that said this must be what everyone else worried about, and therefore the existence of Polaroid. What I didn't realize is that Polaroid film must be developed, and like any other film the development can cause issues. Depending on the ambient temperature, the development time changes. This is a little of guess work as most people don't carry thermometers on them.

So, in a practical sense I don't think I can truly judge exposure with Polaroid. But, what I can get is a general sense of what the lighting is going to look like. The Polaroid becomes a guide, not a measure.

The first shot was taken after an averaging incident light reading. Obviously not an interesting lighting scenario. So, after 2 minutes of developing we were able to look at the film and make a simple adjustment. The exposure looked like it could work, but the way the light entered the scene wasn't to its best advantage. Eight inches backwards and we have a much more interesting shot. High art it is not, but it allows me to see how light could look on film.

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Sorry for the dust, there were real first test shots and were left on the table for a while - these are shots 2&3 out of the back, and shots 2&3 for me and medium format Polaroid. One interesting note - the polaroid film paper is a lot bigger than the image size of the film for the Hasselblad. So, as you can see in the first image (which isn't cropped) the picture area is a lot smaller than the film area. Polaroid made cameras that could use this whole piece of paper, but nothing specifically for the 2.25" square image size of medium format (or the much smaller 1.41"x0.94" size of 35mm film).

Next time, a more familiar topic: the Rhode Island Flowershow 2008 official photos which I shot a few days back. As for the title, I may end up changing it, I'm tired and find it funny.