MorseBlog

A finished Mounted Panorama Framing photographs is expensive. Even with liberal use of on-line framing shops it is still possible to spend a lot of money on simple frames. For panoramas you cannot rely on cheap off-the-shelf frames either. Some time back my wife and I made up some plasterboard (Sheetrock) swatches of color to try on our hall. Later looking at them in the garage I tried to imagine a photograph mounted in the center of such a colored board. With my purchase of the Fuji G617 I have printed a few of the better panoramas on Fuji photographic paper. I use the good folk at Peak Imaging who have always treated my film well. I chose to print 3 images at a time one 20" wide paper. This allowed me to fit three vertically on a 20x20 sheet of paper and this is more economical compared to three 8x20 prints. I then only have the trouble of cutting them apart and making all the margins match. It looks like this... A 20x20 Triptych This is all done in Photoshop usin...

Since the purchase of ColorPerfect/ColorNeg I have had to revise (and improve) my scanning work flow. I have also purchased and read Alex Burke' book Film in a Digital Age . It is a good book and at 180 pages worth the $20.00 if you practice a hybrid film digital work flow. Lots of practical tips. Alex's photos I think speak for themselves. Interestingly the two scanning flows are somewhat different and I wanted to compare them. I normally use Vuescan which can be unclear sometimes but has lots of controls. For instance I have scanned for 48-bit color for a very long time. It was only after using ColorNeg that I discovered all my scans were saved as 24-bit files. This is because there are separate scanning and saving options. The tutorials with ColorNeg straightened all this out. These experiments relate to color negative flow. Alex on the other hand uses EpsonScan and then Photoshop. Reading his scanning flow I decided to see what differences there might be. The recommende...

I finally got delivery of my Fuji GSW690 6x9 camera with 65mm f5.6 lens. The so called Texas Leica medium format rangefinder camera. It is a beast and but for the rangefinder aspect suits my preferences for cameras. Manual, simple, and medium format. The only time I have shot 6x9 is when I take out my Zeiss Ikonta from the 1930s. Bought very cheaply the Ikonta works surprisingly well. Fuji GSW690iii I loaded up some Ilford FP4+ so I could have the result when I got home. (I had tested the shutter speeds using a fast frame rate video camera at home and they all seemed accurate.) I then headed out to the Fen Drayton RSPB refuge near where I live. This is a close-by place that allows some good scenery and is relatively quiet so I can get on with photography without a lot of distraction. It was a warm and very cloudy day and it made for a pleasant few hours out. I took my meter, tripod, and 67mm yellow filter along with the beast. I wanted to test a few different shutter speeds and s...