Last weekend was the Photographic Historical Society of Canada’s semi-annual “Big One” camera show in Woodbridge, just north of Toronto. The PHSC takes over an entire indoor soccer field for this event and there are usually decent bargains to be had. This time, they came in the form of a whole lot of recently expired colour film…
All posts in Photographica
High-Rise
I have a bunch of expired Agfa Scala B&W slide film that was given to me for free (I answered a local Craigslist ad). The film is four years past date, there are no Scala lines running in Canada anymore, and it’s too much hassle for me to do B&W reversal these days — so…
Exercise in simplicity
This started out as a colour, 16:9 image from my Panasonic LX2 point-and-shoot camera. Then I cropped it, converted it to B&W, tinted it, and sharpened it — in Picasa (Google’s free image-manipulation program). Picasa is actually more powerful than people give credit for.
Composition
I nearly wore out the library’s copy of Image by Michael Freeman when I was in grad school. It was the best book on photographic composition I’d ever read then, and it remains so — but it’s out of print and hard to find (I saw a reference to people paying $275 for used copies,…
Dodging and burning
A recent post on Lifehacker discussed techniques for successful B&W digital photography. Many commenters argued about the benefits of shooting on overcast days and RAW vs. JPEG, but I tried to point out that the most memorable and interesting B&W images we see (fine art, portraiture, commercial photography, etc.) have had local contrast and density…
Resources for film scanning
As the years go by, good digital cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper, but dedicated film scanners are becoming more scarce. Konica-Minolta folded a few years back, leaving Nikon (and a few low-end manufacturers) as the only significant player in the dedicated film scanner business. At the same time, Epson keeps rolling out improved versions…
A couple of interesting threads, and a question
Here are a couple of interesting threads from around the Net — In the “of local interest” category, a Flickr discussion in the Toronto group looks at where to get medium-format film (with an emphasis on C-41) processed in Toronto these days. Some of the labs that used to be reliable no longer are, whereas…
Interesting threads from the photo forum world
Here are a couple of interesting threads from the forums — one very general, one very technical. On Photo.net, Rebecca asks the community what advice they wish they had when they started out in photography. A lot of insightful replies, most of which I agree with. (I added my $0.02 as well!) On HybridPhoto.com, Keith…
Mount Holyoke College
.flickr-photo { border: solid 0px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 0px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Earlier this week I spent some time at a rental darkroom downtown. It was the first time I had printed in a conventional darkroom in over a year, which is either…
Clarkson Station
.flickr-photo { border: solid 0px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 0px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } For a while I’ve been looking for a good carry-around P&S digital camera for quick snapshots when I don’t want to lug the D70s around. So after doing a lot of…