“Ghetto scans” of 4X5 photos I took of a couple of churches and a graveyard on New Year’s day. Between the scanning technique, and the paper texture that gets picked up by the scanner (I place a piece of paper on top of negatives to help distribute the light more evenly), “ghetto scanned” 4X5 negatives end up looking like really old photos.
I went out to photograph an old wood mill in the north valley, and as I got to the top of a rail spur there was a dog gnawing on an old carcass. He was so involved at first that he didn’t notice me. After a few shots, he heard the shutter in my camera and looked up. He was standing his ground and then started coming sideways towards me half snarling and licking his chops. I didn’t push my luck by trying to cross the dog’s path to get down where I could get better shots of the buildings. I got a few shots of the mill from standing on the rail spur and then a shot toward the mountains as I walked back to the car. I presume the dog went back to gnawing the carcass.
I ran out to get the mail this afternoon, which would normally take about 15 minutes, but I got distracted by the light, drove up to the north end of Corrales, and got back with the mail about an hour and a half after I left.
Snow, snowmen, and wintery landscapes at sunset.
Winter is upon us with cold temperatures, snow flurries, cloudy skies and gray light. The Sandias have been covered with clouds most of the day, and even with the thermostat set at 70 F (21 C), it felt cold in the house all day without the sun shinning through the windows.
I processed a batch of 4X5 negatives I took of the Sandias and a railroad bridge with my 4X5 view camera over the past few weeks. Since I don’t have a scanner that is made to scan 4X5 negatives, I did “ghetto scanning” of the negatives by making a film holder out of a sheet of card stock, placing the holder and a negative on my old Epson 1260 scanner, placing a sheet of paper over the holder and negative, and holding a lamp with a 25 watt light bulb over the paper the negative is under as a back light while scanning the negative. The scanner is set for reflective scanning, so it doesn’t quite focus on the negative with a backlight, but the process sort of works, giving the resulting images a vintage look.
Since I’m still learning how to process 4X5 film using a daylight processing tank, when I first pulled the negatives out of the tank after the final rinse, they were purple in the middle. Oops! I hadn’t fixed them quite long enough, and I needed to agitate the tank more during the fixing process. So the negatives went back into the tank for another round of fix with more aggressive agitation. After another round of hypo-clearing agent and another rinse, all the purple was gone, but the double round of fixing left the negatives a bit uneven.
Then there’s the issue that the lamp I’m using for the “ghetto scanning” doesn’t fully cover the negatives, so I get bright edges on the images in the resulting scans. I did a little “burning” around the edges in Photoshop to even things out, which worked a pretty well on some images, and didn’t make much difference on others.
Another evening of the beautiful light at sunset along the Rio Grande.
I don’t think this lovely scarecrow is very scary, but she does cut a good hay figure. Fall is in the air — I saw a couple of sandhill cranes fly over this morning, so I went out to the river before sunset and a small flock flew by. The problem is the river is running really high and fast, so the places they normally roost are underwater. The Martinez House got its color coat, and the cottonwoods are turning yellow.
The egg sandwich I made for breakfast seemed particularly worthy of a photo. Mama Manx was walking around the yard like a kitty queen, and the answer to our morning congestion was all the smoke in the air from people burning their fireplaces (haze in last photo).
Vineyards with Mont St Victoire in the background. Aix-en-Provence, France, May 2013.
Off Center & Not Even 