photography experiments

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Well, I figured I would, you know, kickstart the hamster wheels of this channel's R&D department because it hasn't really been doing ---- since the whole Aerochrome thing, probably because it's underfunded and only has one person running it. So there were a few experimental photography things I wanted to try out. No, I didn't soup any film, you can relax. These topics weren't really anything substantial enough to warrant, you know, an individual video, but I kind of figured an anthology approach might be a better way to go. And I figured now was as good a time as any to try them out instead of out in the field with some serious work. God forbid I ever make some. So first things first, the other night Monica was working late. So I sat down to watch a movie that everyone says is peak level of scary, but I'm not a baby. So, you know, I'll be fine. Anyway, after that one didn't work out for this reason or that reason, my first and only choice was really definitely only ever Paris, Texas movie I had never seen before, which seems kind of sacrilegious considering the work I do. So yeah, I get it now. What a movie. I feel like it was much more about capturing the spirit of Americana than anything else. The cinematography was definitely the standout besides trying to figure out however the they time the trains in the background of so many shots. I did notice a huge amount of the use of green, especially under artificial lighting. This shot here was kind of a giveaway as to I think what's going on with that. Fluorescent lights, or maybe back then it was mercury vapor lights. They definitely render a distinct green look on certain film stocks. I thought it was actually quite beautiful and it would be kind of cool to try and completely and unoriginally rip it off for my own knife photography work. After digging through the ancient textbooks, I found out that fluorescent light spikes pretty hard around the 547 nanometer line. I'm actually not too sure why we humans don't perceive fluorescent lights as green, but some film stocks like Kodak Ektachrome and Harmon Phoenix certainly do. So I did some more digging in search of a general, I guess green filter, general green filter that won't wash out the frame with too much green, but will help push that band of light along. And so I found one, the Tiffin CC05G, which costs what the ****, how much? Okay, forget that. Rattan filters are cheap and abundant. I'll just make my own. I was pretty good at botching up some arts and crafts at summer camp anyway. So the CC05G is green for sure, but quite faint. And I thought it might have, you know, little to no effect on the images. So I doubled it up inside the filter rings to get a more, I guess, pronounced rendering. All right, so just doing a quick follow-up here because I did not get that rollback before I filmed the talking head. These look pretty good. Really good. I do think the effect works at its best when there are other colors present on the photo, especially red. On a shot like this, it kind of feels, you know, not fully realized. Like it's just expired film or something. Or maybe like, yeah, I got seriously fucked up in development. Shooting at 100 ISO, which I bumped to 160, just helped, you know, protect the highlights. Wasn't really ideal. I think I was wide open at 115th or 130th for most of these because I'm kind of a human tripod in no other way than no one wants to bring me along because it's a lot of extra work. I'm definitely gonna use this technique going forward. It looks cool as hell. I just put in an order for a CC10G filter, which is the next level up of intensity. So I guess we'll see how that goes and check back in the future. Next up, I wanted to try the latest craze taking over film photography. No, not a mass exodus to digital because it's cheaper, but actually RGB scanning, specifically with a monochrome sensor. This is how a lot of scanning ecosystems actually work under the hood to achieve better color separation. They scan separate red, green, and blue passes of your negative and then combine it to make a color image. And because there's no need to debayer, it's typically understood that you get a sharper image from it. The only way that I know of to do this at the moment is with the cute new pro RGB light source. I'm not calling it cute, by the way. That's just the name of the brand. I didn't want to spend $400 just on this test. So I concocted a cheaper way to do it that should yield similar results. So instead I once again used cheap rattan filters made of gelatin or jello. I don't know, don't try to eat them though. So I got a red 25, green 58, and blue 47, which all sound like some quarterback would say. I withdrew some positives and negatives from my film archives, like a grandpa showing his photos to the uncaring youth. And I set up my Leica M10 monochrome with a Nikkor macro lens. I know it's a weird combo, but at least it's a true monochrome sensor. I started with some recent color positive work to see what would happen. I took one photo each of the image with a red, green, and blue filter. And after bringing three monochrome images into the same Photoshop project and assigning them to the correct RGB channels, I had a color image that was pretty dang close in resemblance to the, I guess, final image of the same scan. So I tried it on a different slide that to the naked eye was quite orange because it was taken at sunset. And I got something quite different, quite ugly, I think. So here's the thing. This process is essentially mechanically finding your white balance for you. The scanning camera is assessing how much light is in each color channel. And in doing so, it's able to kind of like neutralize your images to almost machine perfect, which I now realize isn't exactly ideal for something like color positive film when I want to scan that more closely resembles the actual slide. It turned this golden hour orange positive into what it thought was a white balanced image by, I guess, overcompensating blue to match the amount of orange in the photo. Think of it like how some dudes overcompensate with like lifted trucks, whatever. Naturally, I also tried this with some color negative. This is Cinestill 400D. Once again, we get a nicely balanced image right off the bat. Here's Cinestill 800T. And I'd say it gave us a decent scan overall. I guess my final image was a bit more saturated in blue and yellow, but this isn't bad either. It's passable. And color, you know, it's totally subjective. So it really depends on, I guess, what you're looking for. I probably will not use this technique going forward though. It doesn't really seem to improve the scans by that much. And it's kind of a lot of effort to set up and compile for every frame. It would be kind of a headache to do this for an entire roll of 35 millimeter. And I'd probably hang myself halfway through half frame. So another test that I wanted to run was pushing Ektachrome two stops, which is slowly becoming my own white whale in life, which seemingly will only ever end with me accidentally harpooning my foot. I've pushed Ektachrome two stops to 400 ISO in the past with, you know, mixed results, I guess. But this time I wanted to try pushing it with a heavy low contrast filter to see if it can smooth out some of the harshness, I guess. It's like adding a pinch of cinnamon to smooth out your, you know, vodka Red Bull coffee that you have every morning. Luckily the perfect excuse came along. Tim showed up on my doorstep and we hopped on the bikes to head east to the nearest Gold Rush town, like re-internated prospectors in search of a good time. Of course, I brought a Nikon F2 loaded up with E100 with the intent to do, you know, just horrible things to it. I rated it at 320 ISO instead of the, I guess, mathematical 400. I think I did this because I wanted to spare maybe just a little bit of light to help with the overall push process. Here's a test photo I took before we hit the road. And I think you can kind of see where this is going. Anyway, eventually we traded the cool mountain air for arid desert valleys. We approached our nearest gambling outpost, the electric hum of neon, the desperation to win big and have a better life. The smell of puke in the hallways, it's depravity in its purest form. And we were there to do it ourselves. After being up two, then up 30, then down three, up 20, down 19, down 100, whoops. Up 40, up 40 again, up 20, up 40, up another 40, up 12, down five, and then up eight. I was cool to cash out, sober up and get some photography done. All right, so these shots are overexposed, right? What the happened? I wish I could tell you, buddy, this is still under investigation. If anything, I would expect these shots to be underexposed considering we're rating the film nearly two stops under. So I reviewed the footage like an insurance claim inspector ready to blame it on you. And you know, couldn't find fault. One clue, I guess, is that when I switched over to Tim's 85 millimeter, the shots were blown to the furthest reaches of hell and back. Literally almost nothing was recoverable. I'm guessing that had something to do with the lens not being properly indexed to the prism of the camera. And so the meter was just way off. Because when I switched back to my 35 millimeter lens, the last frame of the roll actually seemed fine. Like it could have been a successful photo. Whatever of it was actually present before it got, you know, Louis XVI by the end of the bulk roll. Anyway, instead of just giving up completely like I've been known to do, I decided to live by the spirit of Reno and just double down, which probably means I'll still lose it all. So at a later date, Chris and I, we drove the same 200 something miles in the dead heat of summer to try this test again. The AC doesn't work in this car. It's sick. And we totally did not just do this drive because I forgot to cash this $50 ticket from the first go around. Anyway, I cashed the $50 ticket, which was totally not why we went all the way out there at all. And then afterwards we hit the streets for work. Not in a common street walker kind of way, but a photography way. You know, ain't too bad of a town, I suppose. I mean, sure, it sucks ass, but whatever. Well, it wasn't planned whatsoever. We showed up by accident during hot August nights, which if anything gave us interesting subjects to compose with. Because I thought something might've been up with the meter on the Nikon F2 on the first go around, I instead used my trusty Nikon FM3A for this one. And again, I rated the film at 320 ISO to maybe help retain some information in the shadows. And once again, the roll was largely overexposed and looking like a bleached butthole. Some shots are cool for sure, but I'm starting to think E100 becomes a bit more narrow in latitude when pushed to the extremes like this. Rating it at 320 ISO instead of 400 probably was a bad idea as well, I am now realizing. One of the few shots of the roll that actually appears decently exposed and could have worked was infested with spiders or some ----, I don't know what happened. All in all, I'd say pushing E100 in general is a pretty volatile process and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if I were to try this again, which I probably won't do anytime soon because I've already tried it twice now and have a deep resentment building up inside me that'll probably turn into a kidney stone. I'd probably rate the roll at its proper 400 ISO or maybe even 500 ISO. I'd keep the low con two on, I think it does actually help. And finally, I'd probably use maybe a slightly heavier warming filter like the 81EF. Anyway, let's put that one to rest for now and move on. This next one is a quick one. I love black and white photography and I love using my monochrome camera. Every time that I get out there and use it, it kind of just like reinstalls this sense of speed and film-like objectivity. The only problem though, besides it being the most expensive camera that I own, the files that it spits out are just a bit too, they're too clinical, they're too sharp and too synthetic, which I understand to some people might sound like me complaining that my food is too tasty, my girlfriend is too hot. But I think that there is actually an easy solution to kind of cut through the sharpness and bring back a film-like look, and that is to use film. So I pulled a Gregg Fraser and went back to the digital RAW files for 36 monochrome images I had lying around on the hard drive. I looked them up and used a Camera 400 to push two stops in my Nikon F2 to shoot them on a 4K monitor. Kind of a goofy setup for sure. The professional way to do this would be with a $12,000 laser setup, but that's not gonna happen. This channel's R&D department is operating on the same budget as a ham sandwich. The results after developing, and I scanned the images back in, actually surprisingly good. These shots now have that filmic edge to them, and of course, lots of beautiful Kentmere grain. The whole process even seems to install like a slight glow to the image around the highlights that's pretty pleasing. This process definitely won't save a bad photo, trust me more than anyone on that one, but it takes the look to the next level. I can actually see myself using this technique going forward. It kind of gives you the best of both worlds, the flexibility of digital and the look and feel of film. I've already shot another project using this look, and it turned out baller as hell, but more on that some other time. Okay, this next one is more, I don't know, arts and crafts at summer camp than anything technical, but it's still cool nonetheless. This all started when I saw a very unique listing for a certain type of lens actually, an Industar 10, which is a rangefinder lens. This particular one that I found had been modified by somebody to be M42 mount. And if you're like, hold on, pause, don't worry, you're not alone. I also had many questions, mostly just about the enormous flange distance incompatibility between SLR and rangefinder lenses. If you're unfamiliar with the term flange distance, think of it like a restraining order. Some lenses can't come within a certain distance of the film plane, otherwise they won't be able to properly focus to infinity, because if they do, they'll have a lawsuit on their hands. So the short of it is that the glass elements of the Industar 10, which this lens is not, but it is pretty similar. Those glass elements actually sit down here at the end of the telescoping barrel, quite far away from the film plane. So somebody did the measurements and they chopped the, I guess, empty half of the barrel off, and then they secured the front element down here to the focusing helicoid, which is pretty clever if you ask me. So I started thinking, how can I use this lens regularly in my work? But more importantly, what is the biggest camera that I can possibly put this on to be a physical representation of insecurity? So I settled on the Nikon F2 for a couple of reasons, oddly enough. One reason is that the diameter of the Industar mount fits quite perfectly into the throat of the Nikon F mount. You know, once I filed this weird little growth off the lens. Now, nubless like that one dude from Game of Thrones. The lens rests nicely on the F mount locking system and miraculously focuses to infinity, despite the one millimeter Nikon F and M42 flange difference. But I'd still need to lock the lens down because it is not a native F mount lens. So I bought a donor F2 body. This project is getting expensive. And that was to simply remove the F mount ring, clean it up a little, and then adhere the Industar lens to it to be installed onto the working body. This is all a little ridiculous, right? When I could have just bought an M42 camera. Whatever, shut up, just let it happen. But before that, I ran into another roadblock that always seems to happen on these f***ing projects. With the lens at infinity, the internal flip-up mirror of the SLR was getting stuck on something when it actuated. All right, day two of what is quickly becoming the never-ending project. Everything's f***ed. I was able to figure out that the mirror on the Nikon F2 is getting stuck on this rear retaining ring because there is a, where is it? I think it's called like a brake washer or something like that. This retaining ring sits on top of it. And because of that, it is just a little bit too thick and protrudes a little bit too much in the rear. Literally just by like, oh man, like half a millimeter. So I've exhausted most of my options. I've been to the hardware store five times, twice today. I'm down to my last resort, which is to use a metal file and just shim a couple millimeters off of this rear retaining ring. Don't disassemble lenses, guys. Don't be like me. Anyway, eventually the retaining ring issue was shimmied down and the mirror could clear at infinity. So I got my hands on some potent-ass glue, whose toxic fumes in a not very well-ventilated office made me see what lies beyond the astral plane. But when I returned a changed man who's seen the fabric of time itself, I just mashed the lens onto the donor F-mount ring at a cure overnight, like a ham, and then installed it onto the working Nikon F2. All right, so the first of two tests is gonna be if the shutter can actually fire with this thing fully attached. If the mirror clears the retaining ring, it seemed to when I was running tests. So hopefully it is still that way. Let's do one 125th. Cool. So the second test is gonna be seeing if it focuses to infinity, which I think it does. It should. But just because it should doesn't mean it always does. Let's see, wide open. We're at infinity. Oh yeah, it's very close. I think it does. I think it's fine. Yeah, no, it does. The build was done for now. I suppose a rangefinder lens on an SLR is quite an unnatural backwards combination. It'd be like calling this guy Bob Sponge. Obviously the next step was to show it off quite proudly to some people. Oh my God. What? And they were all just a bit confused as to what horrors I cooked up in my workshop and whether it was really ethical or not. The lens natively takes 19 millimeter filters, which are a pain in the ass to source, much less disassemble and replace with rat and cutouts. But hey, I did it. And the photos, they look pretty good. So we can move on with our lives and I don't have to do this ever again. Here's a toilet photo. Now I have two Nikon F2s that use lenses from different mounts because I guess I just have a fear of Nikon F mount commitment. 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Like something will definitely explode if I do it. Well, this astro filter that I stumbled upon is actually a very specialized tri-band filter. If we look at the spectral graph, you can see it only lets in a very narrow band of red light, green light, and blue light, throwing all the in-between colors like yellow, orange, purple, nurple, and cyan to the wayside. I think the intended effect is to kind of like parse through, you know, things like light pollution and focus more on wavelengths that like deep space nebulas emit. Either way, I wanted to see what this filter would do if I totally didn't use it for its intended purpose and instead use it on some ektachrome. Turns out it's an interesting look. It's very blue when peering through the viewfinder, but the shots came out quite purple. The look is maybe not really for me, but because RGB scanning exists and we can more or less neutralize an image with an overwash of any one color, I decided to do just that, a RGB monochrome scan on a tri-band RGB filtered photo. What a combo. Too bad that it still looks terrible. Speaking of celestial bodies, the moon. It's basically a giant reflector for soft light. If only it reflected enough light to shoot on film, we'd be in business. So I wonder if there's a way to fake it. Turns out there's actually a lot of legacy knowledge from the days that's more or less been forgotten. But every once in a while, you stumble upon some of this ancient wisdom in the form of a rune and just have to test it out. That's more or less what happened when I picked up this Kodak booklet from the era. And after flipping through it, one little throwaway definitely stuck out to me. It was simply that with some slide film, a 47 filter and two stops of underexposure, you could kind of simulate a photo taken under moonlight. There's even a single photo of the intended effect. At first I was pretty skeptical like you probably are, but then I realized I got nothing better to do this weekend after all my friends canceled on me and went to Daytona. So where better than Daytona to test this artificial haunted moonlight look than a graveyard? Luckily it was just as sunny as Daytona probably, so all my friends can go get. The 47 filter is the key to all this. It's a dense blue filter, probably meant more for like converting daylight to tungsten or something of that nature, but whatever. Kind of looks like a Viagra commercial with this filter. The all knowing and all seeing Kodak 35 millimeter booklet that for some reason I had visions of when I journeyed out past the astral plane, you know, high on glue, wishes this upon us, so we must do. Set the meter on the Nikon F2 to 100 ISO and then I'd raw dog a meter reading. Then I'd lock the settings in and then place the 47 filter in front of the lens. That filter cuts a little less than two stops of light, I believe, but it's close. So it all kind of comes out in the wash at the end of the day. So is this stupid just some practical joke left in the handbook, or does it look cool like those moonlit scenes from Nosferatu, you know, the part before we totally see him hang dong? I don't know, it kind of works. It's artsy for sure. It's basically red scale, except blue. It looks like a bad day for night from the nineties or something. It looks like moonlight if you've never seen moonlight before. I don't know, maybe some of these shots could pass for it, but it's a stretch. You hear that? Yeah. Ghosts, dude. I think this technique actually could be improved with a few things. For one, don't shoot in harsh daylight where the lines are pretty solid. Moonlight is bounce light after all, so the shadows are quite soft and scattered, like roadkill. I think if you do straight up just shoot daylight like this, maybe it could be helped along if you just use like a strong diffusion filter, like a Lokon 2. That's what I used here with these follow-up tests I did during the day and during overcast lighting for comparison. This look could potentially further be, I guess, sellable with a polarizer as well to try and turn that blue sky, I guess, more black like it's nighttime. Am I gonna keep this technique in my kit for next time? Probably not. No, it's a little gimmicky. I don't really know how it could be used for like regular work. I can see it being used for like a very specialized project where you want moonlit photos, but you want a little more flexibility. Whatever, that was dumb. That's about it though. I would say most of the things that I tested out were more or less dead ends. Get it? Because it's a graveyard. But whatever, it could be worse. At least none of my experiments got loose and ate me. That'd be embarrassing.