More black-and-white photos

I've taken some more photos (3 rolls of 120 and 1 roll of 35mm) since my last post; here are some that I liked:

The last two were with a 20mm lens on 35mm film and I thought the exaggerated sense of perspective was interesting. The last one was a handheld 1/8 second exposure so I took a couple shots (because processing this film is cheap!) and just hoped for the best. I should've turned on the oscilloscope and captured an interesting waveform, though. Note the computer desktop background!

I don't know if this is a limitation of the film format, my equipment, or my scanning, but the medium-format photos (the first three) show a lot more detail and less grain than the 35mm photos.

Strawberry Hill, Golden Gate Park

I think this picture came out really well:

Medium-format photography adventures!

Developing 120 black-and-white film

Revision history

2012/04/23: Initial release.
Notes from development: Increase duration of continuous wash. Consider switching to 1+3 developer dilution with 22 min. development time. Also consider reducing development time. Also, developer ended at 22°C.

2012/05/01: Increased continuous wash duration to 5 minutes. Added note to minimize handling of developer tank.
Notes from development: Started developer temp at 19.5° to allow for heating; ended at 21°C. Some artifacts along top edge of film ("top" relative to coiled cylinder inside the developing tank), see this example.

Telescope

I bought a telescope yesterday! It is a Meade 70AZ-A, a 70mm refractor with a 600mm focal length (f/8.5). I got it for $70 from Woodland Hills Telescope (the brick-and-mortar version). They were pretty busy when I was there, but they're nice and have a good camera/photo department as well.

Big Nikon lens and camera review

I've been taking pictures for almost a year now. I wouldn't describe myself as a photographer..more like a camera enthusiast.

I started with a Nikon N65 and a normal zoom lens that my dad had bought me new in 2001. Over the last 10 months, I've been doing a lot of eBay shopping and have now accumulated 9 lenses and 5 camera bodies:

Lenses:

1. 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-D
2. 50mm f/1.8 AF
3. 70-210mm f/4-5.6 AF
4. 200mm f/4 AI
5. 180mm f/2.8 AF
6. 180mm f/2.8 AI
7. TC-200 2x teleconverter
8. 24mm f/2.8 AI
9. 20mm f/4 AI

Camera bodies:

1. N65
2. FE

Here are my thoughts on this collection of photography equipment:

Mega image comparison

Using the same subject (some flowers...I'd call them daffodils, but they're purple), we have 3 sets of comparisons to make. In the first bout, our contenders are:

1. Snapfish scan
2. ScanCafe scan

In the second bout:

1. DIY scan (Epson Perfection V300, I think)
2. Swan photo labs scan
3. ScanCafe scan

Finally, the headliner matchup:

1. iPhone 4
2. Nikon D90
3. Print film (Fujicolor 100)
4. Slide film (Fujichrome Velvia 50)

Onto the comparisons!

Snapfish vs. ScanCafe

Here we have a print film scanned by two different vendors:

• Snapfish is primarily a digital photo products company, but they also run a mail-in photo processing and scanning service. They are very cheap (around $0.20 per image developed and scanned).
• ScanCafe is a photo scanning company in Bangalore that prides itself on high resolution scans "by hand". Their standard price is $0.35 per image, but often have sales. The biggest downside is their turnaround time - about two months.

Fujicolor 100, scanned by Snapfish

Fujicolor 100, scanned by ScanCafe

ScanCafe messed up on this one. I like the color and exposure on the Snapfish scan a lot better. This is generally not the case.

Fujicolor 100, scanned by Snapfish

Fujicolor 100, scanned by ScanCafe

In the details, it's not much of a fight. ScanCafe has better scanners and higher-res files.

DIY vs. Swan Labs vs. ScanCafe

Here we have a slide film scanned three ways:

1. By me, on an Epson Perfection V300 scanner using the provided software. Free, but fairly time-consuming (90 sec per image, or 50 min for a 36-exposure roll). 
2. Swan Labs, where my local camera store outsources their E-6 process. $0.18 to $0.39 per scanned image, depending on resolution (the examples below are the expensive kind).
3. ScanCafe (see first section) 

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned at home

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by Swan Labs

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by ScanCafe

These are remarkably similar. I think Swan Labs vs. ScanCafe is mainly an issue of taste regarding exposure settings. Even the DIY scan has similar color. A little hazy, but I think that can be fixed by the levels slider.

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned at home

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by Swan Labs

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by ScanCafe

The DIY scan is actually at a higher resolution (4000 dpi) than either of the outsourced scans, so the fuzziness is entirely due to the optics. The Swan Labs scan is supposed to be about the same resolution as the one by ScanCafe, but it has some very apparent blockiness. Fraudulent resizing? Bad Bayer algorithm?

Anyways, it's clear that ScanCafe sets the bar for scan detail. I like its colors, too.

iPhone vs. DSLR vs. negatives vs. slides

Four contenders in the final matchup:

1. iPhone 4 camera. Ubiquitous (for me, anyways) and quite good. $600 MSRP, but the camera is only a small portion of that.
2. Nikon D90 digital SLR. $780 MSRP.
3. Fujicolor 100 negative (print) film. $0.23 for film, processing, and low-res scanning. Add $0.30 for high-res scans.
4. Fujichrome Velvia 50 slide film. $0.65 for film, processing, and low-res scanning. Add $0.17 for high-res scans.

iPhone 4

Nikon D90

Fujicolor 100, scanned by Snapfish

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by ScanCafe

Perhaps purple is not a good color for the iPhone sensor. I've gotten some great colors from the iPhone camera; this isn't. Comparing the darker corners of the image with the center, there's a clear color shift as one of the color channel saturates.

Here, the DSLR has too much dynamic range. Instead of losing the background clutter in the shadows, we retain contrast. And the greens and purples are not as saturated as in film. In that regard, the Velvia is just ridiculous. For this image, though, that's a good thing. Come to think of it, it's probably a good thing for anything worth taking a picture of.

iPhone 4

Nikon D90

Fujicolor 100, scanned by ScanCafe

Fujichrome Velvia 50, scanned by ScanCafe

The iPhone's tiny sensor loses big time on the image detail front. It's at a disadvantage on resolution (approx 2000 dpi vs. 3000 for the other images), but it's already struggling to fill those pixels with meaningful information. I think there's some clear evidence of edge sharpening and noise reduction going on here.

The DSLR, despite the DX format, is incredibly sharp. Simply astounding. This close-up image is an 8.6X crop of the original image, and it still looks fine. That's like getting a 300mm lens out of a 35mm lens. What.

The slide film beats out the print film in this contest. I don't know if that's supposed to happen, but the edges are a lot cleaner on the slide film. Hard to rule out focus issues or camera motion, however. The slide film is also a bit grainier, but it's not unpleasant.

Household lighting adventures

A few years ago (2007 or 2008) I got pretty excited about the GE Reveal incandescents with neodymium-doped glass. I bought into GE's marketing term "enhanced full spectrum" (in my mind, I imagined a hotter filament or maybe some form of two-photon fluorescence). When I got them home, however, I saw that they're not much different from normal incandescents, and still not at all like daylight.

I put together a CD spectrometer, which showed the GE bulbs to have a sharp absorption band in the yellow region but otherwise identical to a normal incandescent. Hardly "enhanced" or "full" in any way. So I mailed them an angry letter, citing my spectrometry results, and a few weeks later they sent back a $5 coupon for GE light bulbs.

After that disappointment, I started buying CFLs. It was hard not to; PG&E was (and still is) subsidizing them to $1 for a 23W bulb (100W equivalent). Based on my estimates, it'd take less than a month to recover that $1 on your electricity bill. The lower wattage also means you can put more powerful bulbs in smaller lamps (like this beautiful hanging fixture we have that's made of tissue paper and kindling).

So they're cheap and efficient, but I've had problems with reliability (two have somehow failed) and fit (we have a floor lamp that won't fit the CFLs' wider ballast base). I'm not too concerned about the mercury, but maybe I should be? It's been a couple years and I still haven't gotten around to recycling those busted CFLs.

A lot of people take issue with fluorescents' higher color temperature. I personally prefer it, but I grew up with daylight-balanced T8 fluorescent lights at home, so incandescents all look yellow and dim to me. My problem with fluorescents is the spiky emission spectrum. The human eye doesn't seem to mind (though the 2700K CFLs do look pretty weird), and digital cameras compensate with auto white balance, but analog film is not so tolerant:

iPhone 4

Velvia 50

I've also tried a Fuji film with their "4th Color Layer", which improves color accuracy under fluorescent lighting. It works a lot better, but still comes out slightly green. These were taken under the same lighting as above:

iPhone 4

Fujicolor Superia X-tra 400

And this is not to say that my interest in continuous-spectrum lighting is primarily for photography; I take very few pictures indoors. But maybe there will be some general quality-of-life benefits to having higher CRI artificial lighting.

Recently I got excited about halogen lamps. I'm most familiar with them as dorm room fire hazards and Source Four theater lights, but recent news about the EISA §321(a) incandescent lamp energy efficiency standards and Ikea discontinuing incandescent bulbs brought up halogens as an energy-efficient incandescent replacement. I found this a bit surprising because I always thought of halogens as a comparatively inefficient devices. But that is wrong.

The energy savings come from increased emission of visible (vs. infrared) light due to the higher temperature black-body (the halogen gas makes this possible by mitigating filament evaporation). For the incandescent replacements, the quartz halogen bulb is mounted inside a larger (incandescent-sized) UV-filtering glass bulb, reducing fire hazard (the bulb surface should be cooler than an incandescent of equivalent light output) and removing the possibility of fingerprint-induced bulb explosions.

Anyways, it's an attractive combination: higher color temperature, black-body spectrum, and drops in to a standard E26 screw base. So I decided to buy one to try it out. Impressions:

• I'm not seeing this purported energy efficiency. The Philips Halogena bulb I bought says "Energy Saver 40w = 75w" on the packaging, but it only produces 550 lm, which is far less than a 75W incandescent.  Its energy efficiency is pretty weak, too:
  

  Type	Power (W)	Output (lm)	Efficiency (lm/W)
  GE soft white A19 incandescent	40	490	12.3
  Philips R20 indoor flood halogen	40	550	13.8
  GE soft white A19 incandescent	60	840	14.0
  GE soft white A19 incandescent	75	1170	15.6
  GE soft white A19 incandescent	100	1690	16.9
  Source Four HPL 115VX (3050K) halogen	575	12360	21.5
  Source Four HPL 115V (3250K) halogen	575	16520	28.7
  Feit Electric compact fluorescent	23	1600	69.6

• Perhaps having a reflector (R20) makes the overall light output less efficient than an omnidirectional bulb (A19)? However, the omnidirectional bulbs lose more light in the fixture, so their actual output is less than what's in the table.
• The last entry is the CFL that used to be in the fixture now occupied by the halogen. It's also an omnidirectional bulb.
• The above investigation pointed out a trend I hadn't noticed before: tungsten efficiency goes up with wattage. Maybe there's less conductive/convective thermal losses? Maybe filament limitations only let you go up to higher filament temperatures at higher powers? Perhaps the higher-wattage halogens will be more efficient.
  
• Color temperature is also pretty lame. Not any whiter than an incandescent. This may also increase with wattage, though, so maybe I'll need to get a 100W halogen to see a difference. The 3250K theater lights are definitely whiter than this, but they're also only rated for 300 hours of operation.

Velvia 50 vs.

When I was 10, I very excitedly read a book on 35mm photography from cover-to-cover. It didn't talk about slide vs. print film except to say that they're developed using different processes, and for a long time I thought slide film was a novelty for people who wanted to project vacation slides.

It was only a few months ago, when I first read Ken Rockwell's glowing recommendation of Velvia, that I began to change my impression. Over Thanksgiving, I flipped through the photography book again and noticed that all of its photos were taken on slide film! So I had to try it to see for myself. Here's what I found:

Velvia vs. itself

One of my biggest worries about slide film was its exposure latitude. I'd heard that you have to be dead on with your exposure and bracket any shots you really cared about.

After shooting a roll, I think that's an exaggeration. I didn't want to expend film on a real bracketing test, but here's one that happened accidentally. Even with automatic matrix metering, pointing the camera at different locations produced different exposure settings, so I took two shots. There's not much dynamic range to begin with (overcast day), but there's a 1 stop exposure difference between these two shots, and there's not a huge difference.

Velvia

Velvia, +1 stop

In this case, the folks who scanned it did some exposure tweaking: the difference is slightly more apparent on the original slides. My exposure log might also be off.

When faced with a scene with a larger dynamic range, you do have to choose what you want well-exposed, and the auto matrix meter might not do what you want. You could use spot metering; my technique is to take a picture on a digital camera (I used my iPhone) and use that to decide how many stops to adust the compensation on the auto-exposure. It also doubles as a date/time/GPS-tagged index print!

iPhone metering shot

In this case, I set the 35mm camera's exposure compensation to -1 stop. But the longer lens cropped out the darker areas, so this shot ended up -2.8 stops relative to the iPhone shot.

Velvia, -2.8 stops from iPhone

Almost 3 stops, and it looks fine. So it seems there's still a bit of tolerance with exposure settings. Not so scary.

Things are going to be contrast-y in direct sunlight, but I expect that. In order to fit what you can see (human eye: huge dynamic range) onto what you can display (prints or monitors: small dynamic range), there must either be clipping (slide film) or dynamic range compression (print film, or HDR in a more extreme case). Compression preserves more detail and may be more appropriate if we develop high dynamic range displays, but currently I think clipping is the more naturalistic option.

Of course, this begs the question: can post-processing simulate the effects of slide film? I think the answer is yes, but only if you're careful (more careful than I care to be).

Velvia vs. iPhone

Since I was using the iPhone as an exposure meter, I have a lot of comparisons between the two. Furthermore, the iPhone lens is equivalent to 28mm, which is the wide end of my normal zoom.

For one, I found that the iPhone has a pretty similar dynamic range to Velvia.

Velvia

iPhone (+0.4 stop)

In this case, I like the Velvia colors better.

The iPhone's auto white balance can be very different from the daylight-balanced Velvia:

Velvia

iPhone (-1.3 stop)

So which is better? I've seen it go both ways:

Velvia

iPhone

Above, I think the iPhone's auto white balance was fooled by the red leaf litter, giving the overall image an undesirable bluish tint.

Velvia

iPhone (+0.5 stop)

In this case, I think the iPhone did the right thing, and shooting daylight-balanced Velvia on an overcast day (which has a bluer color temperature) makes the yellow-orange leaves appear greenish.

Velvia

iPhone

I like the Velvia better here because of the better hue separation between the fence and the sand, but the warmness of the iPhone shot is nice, too.

Velvia

iPhone

The iPhone shot looks a lot better here, with an incredibly blue sky and a building that just pops. I don't know what happened. It's not the exposure level; maybe it's secret iPhone image enhancement?

Velvia vs. DSLR

In this case, DSLR = Nikon D90.

DSLR

Velvia

DSLR, Photoshopped to increase contrast

And that's pretty much it. I think post-processing can match Velvia's color saturation (I accidentally overdid it in this case), but the colors look funny when you push it like that. I think Velvia does a much better job capturing the dark red here.

The next example was taken during a cloudy day. Besides the bright sky, there isn't much dynamic range in the shot.

DSLR

DSLR, Photoshop auto-contrast

Velvia

iPhone

iPhone HDR

This is a pretty poor comparison photo. Velvia loses big time because of the white balance (blue clouds yield teal grass and greenish yellow leaves). The DSLR with auto-contrast looks pretty good, better than the iPhone. The iPhone HDR is pretty interesting. Otherwise not much to see here.

Velvia vs. print film

Purple flowers! For this test, print film = Fujicolor 100:

DSLR

Print film

iPhone

Velvia

I like the colors on the print film better than the DSLR. iPhone is pretty interesting: I think the blue is due to the iridescence of the flowers, and the iPhone's wide field of view and small absolute aperture make it especially apparent. Finally, the Velvia: the color on the screen is different from the color on the slide. I think it's a scan issue, because the slide color is a closer match to the other images. But the saturation, especially on the leaves, does look nice.

DSLR

Print film, low-quality scan

iPhone

Velvia

The close-ups are pretty revealing, though probably irrelevant for the vast majority of situations. Note that any compression artifacts you see are due to Blogspot/Picasa, not the original image.

The DSLR is incredibly sharp and free of any artifacts. The Velvia is also very nice, with slight grain on the shadowed leaves in the background. We can't really evaluate the print film except to say that Snapfish's scan is poor. The iPhone close-up reveals its "magic" at work: noise reduction (textured areas appear dead flat) and sharpening (ringing at the edges).

Conclusions

One final note: the scans are pretty different from the slides. I'm also a bit miffed because it looks like the scanned images were upsampled from a lower-resolution scan. So the scans aren't great. I'll be able to make stronger claims when I them all scanned at ScanCafe -- that should take out the scanning variability. For now, this is what I'll say:

• iPhone has poor detail resolution. Image may be 5 MP, but it can't actually resolve that, and it makes up with signal processing.
• Slide colors are awesome. Scan captures some of it, but the original slides make even the duller colors look vibrant.
• Contrast can be increased to make the DSLR look more like the Velvia, and I expect that more careful tweaking can match it better, at least with respect to luminosity (i.e., characteristic H-D curve). However, since recording color involves projecting the continuously-valued (infinite-dimensional) spectral irradiance onto a 3-dimensional (4, for some print film) space (e.g., RGB) through some spectral response function (which is different for different films and digital sensors), it will be impossible to get the color the same. And I think this difference is apparent to casual observation.