Paging "Hermitism" -- photeaux ;-)

mhardy6647

My much-beloved son kindly just got my photos using your 80mm f/2.8 AF-Nikkor lens (using a very vintage Nikon F and some brand-spankin' new Kodak Tri-X) developed, scanned and uploaded! He's a fine lad (and a fine photographer, too, but that's another story).

DSC_0574 by mhardy6647, on Flickr

The light meter on that ol' girl is dysfunctional -- I am not expert in eyeballin' exposures, so... I used my DSLR in a semi-auto mode to get the ballpark exposure, and transferred the resulting shutter speed and f-stop to the "F" and the 80 mm lens -- kinda 'ghetto' but...
I was quite pleasantly surprised by the results, so I figured I'd reproduce a couple of 'em here in their very own thread. I hope this isn't too esoteric for the forum :-P

These photos were taken in early November (after the leaves were gone, but before the snow started to fly).









and just to be on-topic whilst squatting on an audio company's bandwidth :- )

Hermitism

I got my name in a thread heading...I feel like a celebrity!

I have a few questions if no one minds me asking them on an audio forum. It looks like you removed the filter from the lens. Did you take some with and some without the filter? If so, did you notice a difference. I remember someone here commenting once about there being more clarity when not using a filter. Have you or anyone else compared using b/w film vs. using a digital camera and then using Photoshop or some other higher end software to turn it into a b/w picture? I personally have always loved b/w framed photos.




The first thing I did when I got that lens back was run to the store and buy a roll of film. Interestingly enough, the film has never left it's box. Life gets in the way sometimes. Mark, I've missed reading your posts and having to run and find a dictionary!

mhardy6647

With malice aforethought :- ) I did not log my photo parameters when I took pictures with the lens.

I removed the filter to take photos of the lens, but I shot with the filter on. There's no doubt that adding two more air/glass surfaces (not to mention adding a piece of glass) in front of the lens certainly won't add contrast, resolution, or light transmission :-P to the lens, I (still) think of those filters as cheap insurance to protect a lens -- especially given the rarity of this particular one. All of this is to say, I took the photos with the filter on.

I did not, as best I remember, take parallel photos with the DSLR and the F. That said, since I was toting the DSLR around to use as a glorified light meter, I may have taken some. I'll go back & check.

The photos were taken around Veterans' Day.

As to digital b&w vs. reduced silver grains... I very much like the looks of desaturated digital images, and those desaturated photos can make nice, surprisingly sumptuous prints. But, even looking at the scans of the photos I took with your lens, I can tell they're Tri-X (for better or worse)! Tri-X has always struck me as quite contrasty; somewhat more so than I might prefer, but they don't seem to make Plus-X any more! :- P I like to shoot Tri-X with a red filter, but I didn't have one to fit the 80 mm lens. I tried hard to under-expose by about a stop (which, to my eye always made for a nicer photo with Tri-X), with mixed success.

That's about the best I can do in terms of answering your questions.

It was a heck of a lot of fun to use a real, ker-chunk shutter equipped, film camera again. It was even more fun to see halfway decent images from it! My son did give me some film for Christmas (and some old lenses, too!) -- so I think I'll be doing some more.


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mhardy6647

Not the most colorful substrate, but here's a digital photo as taken and then desaturated:

straight from the camera (JPG format):

Nikon F micro chrome by mhardy6647, on Flickr

and desaturated (just using MS's photo editor, nothin' fancy):

Nikon F micro mono by mhardy6647, on Flickr

color:

Nikon F 135mm chrome by mhardy6647, on Flickr

mono

Nikon F 135mm mono by mhardy6647, on Flickr