Posts by Bruce Buckman
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Capture: See Into the Trees, in reply to JacksonP,
Well my brother in the US has just got himself an Epson V700 and his results look pretty good but I’m broke right now so dropping $900 on a scanner wasn’t going to happen. So instead I bought a small (A5) LED powered lightbox off trademe. Then I got some heavy cardboard and made a couple of masks for the filmstrip, and taped them to the box with duct tape so they operate as a double lid, holding it in place and blocking any extra light. A couple of lead weights on top before shooting help keep the filmstrip flat.
Then I mounted my camera on the tripod with the 50mm lens and a single 20mm extension tube. Doesn’t quite fill the frame so I may tinker with other tube combos to get it right. If you have a proper macro lens then that would be better.
The nice thing is I can shoot directly from Lightroom (tethered capture in the File menu). I set up a preset in Lightroom that includes inverting the tone map (so it goes from negative to positive) and a few other basic tweaks. Then I do any cropping/angle adjustment and send the image to Photoshop for any other tweaks.
Problems:
1] Getting the film plane and sensor to be perfectly parallel is tricky. With even a slight angle you get distortion/lack of focus at edges. I plan to get one of those hotshoe mounted levels for the camera to try and ensure my camera is perfectly level.
2] Also my DIY film strip holder is a little fiddly. I’m thinking if you had one of the film strip holders that comes with scanners that using this would be a better solution.
3] Not so much a problem as a thing to get used to but all the controls (blacks, whites, shadow etc) in Lightroom are reversed once you’ve inverted the tone map.
4] The light from the lightbox is low compared to a flash, so exposure times are comparatively long (1/8th), so you need to make sure you’re not shaking the setup when you click the mouse. -
Another one from Cornwall Park.
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Otuataua Stonefields.
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I’ve been playing with film, which I haven’t done for about 15 years. It’s all very messy – without a scanner I have to digitise the images with the digital camera. But it is fun not seeing what the images are like until you go through all that fiddly process.
Cornwall Park, and a gnarled tree one from Otuataua Stonefields.
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Some more. It really was quite surreal there today. Kids were walking around the hills with parents and shouting out to each other in the gloom like moon explorers who had lost their lunar explorer buggy. “Where are we?” “I don’t know!”
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Cornwall Park, Auckland in this morning’s fog. Except it’s not morning, being about 12:30pm when I took these. It was fogtastic.
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Jeez Russell, I had that exact same Nuclear Free Pacific T-Shirt, bought at Victoria Park Market I think.
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… and more …
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And some more …
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Here’s some from the previous Sculpture Trail in 2012. I didn’t have my camera with me so took these with the iPhone.
