Technical – Page 2

Perry Green and Henry Moore.

8th May 2020 – My target for today was to go for my daily walk in the morning, expose a roll of black and white film on the walk. Get home and process the film, scan the negs and write this blog post.

I first met a problem with the scanning and had to do it again. I think it may have been a problem with using the dust and scratch removal on the Plustek scanner. They came out a bit blotchy so had to re-scan them all. Second thing I hadn’t factored in was that yesterday was a celebration in remembrance of V.E. day so had to go out for a social distancing street party later in the day and consume vast quantities of beer. All not conducive to finishing the post.

Anyway, continued today. Negs scanned and all OK. Edited in a format to post and ready to go.

The walk; A stroll of about 2.5 miles in the Hertforshire countryside near the village of Perry Green.

The equipment;

Olympus OM2n 35mm film camera.
Olympus 35-105 f3.5 Zuiko lens.
Olympus 200mm f4.0 Zuiko lens.
Fomapan 200 film developed in Ilford ID11 1+3 dilution @20degC. for 13 minutes.
Negs scanned using a Plustek Opticfilm 8100 film scanner with Silverfast 8 plus software.
Minimal post processing. Nik Silver Efex to add 35% sepia toning and black border.

The walk takes you from the church in Perry Green and past and round the Henry Moore Foundation grounds.

Past the farm buildings including what looks like an old WW11 Nissen hut.

Some interesting textures on the old buildings.

I like the verticality of the farm buildings against the randomness of the plants!

Further along the walk we pass one of the Henry Moore sculptures. Large Figure in a Shelter.

And more Moore across the road! Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped.

The modern Visitor Centre to the Henry Moore Foundation.

We do a right just after the entrance to Henry Moore Gardens and follow a footpath which takes us round the other edge of the gardens.

Doing another right at the end of the gardens takes us along the end of the gardens and through the fields past more Moore sculptures.

Henry Moore sculpture. Large Upright Internal/External Form.

Another right turn takes us back along the field behind the Henry Moore Gardens and views of some more sculptures.

Sheep figure a lot in Henry Moore’s artwork and there are many in the surrounding fields.

Walking through the local town recently I took some night time shots with my Sony RX100 MkIII. I had got the camera set to a high ISO setting as I was taking hand held shots. When viewing the photos on the computer I was pleasantly pleased with the results from this little compact camera. This seemed to be lacking in the digital noise that I was expecting to see so I decided on a revisit to test out the camera further.

It was raining slightly so there was a sheen on the road surface. I set the exposure compensation to minus 1 so that I could register some deep blacks which should show up any digital noise in the photos. I took all the photos with the Rich Tome Mono setting which takes three images and stitches them together. I started off with this shot with the ISO set to 3200, which looks pretty good.

This is the same image cropped to 1600 x 1200 pixels.

I then pushed up the ISO to 8000 which again, isn’t bad. I would expect to see more noise within the black areas.

This time I started off at and ISO level of 8000.

The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.

I then increased the ISO to it’s maximum of 12800.

The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.

The RX100 seems to be an ideal small camera for night time shooting when you want to carry a compact and not want to carry round a tripod.

I’ll be going out again soon to do some more photos using a couple of my micro four thirds cameras as a comparison.

Category: Technical

My daily lockdown walk with my OM2n.

Perry Green and Henry Moore.

Night time shooting with the Sony RX100 mkIII