Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Neopan 400, Rodinal 1+45 (11 minutes).
I managed to get on film what I wanted to get when I pressed the shutter…
Part of this is due to the fact that my lab charges more for B&W development than they do for colour (slide) development. (Or their contact sheets are very expensive). Costs run to over 10 EUR per roll. At over 2 rolls a week on average, that gets to over 100 EUR a month.
Luckily, when I chose my film, I went for a classic B&W film, so I dug up my parents’ old developing equipment and ordered some chemicals. This weekend, I developed my first few rolls. It was easier than I expected.
I used Agfa Rodinal, since it’s very cheap1 and lasts forever (reportedly). I used a 1+45 dilution2 and developed for 11 minutes, with 30 seconds agitation every 3 minutes. Followed by a water stop-bath and 6 minutes in RXA fixer (rapid, non hardening). Temperature was around 19 degrees, which is the temperature of the tapwater in my kitchen3.
I also caught up with my scanning this weekend, so from now on, I can develop and scan each roll in a reasonable time. Who needs digital?
It’s funny how you know things, yet don’t really acknowledge them.
I’ve always known that human vision is tremendously adaptive. Dark scenes, light scenes, red light, green light. See it for a few seconds and the brain/eye combo applies the correct filters, switches to the right aperture, and presto: Well exposed image with a good white balance.
Sadly, cameras suck at this.
By now, I’ve got the colour problem pretty well under control, and know when to adjust my WB/filter my lens, and when to gel my flash. With B&W this problem isn’t even there.
The light problem is trickier though. I’m finding that guessing the exposure in low light scenes is much more difficult than in well-lit scenes1. Especially once you get below EV 6, light levels drop fast, while the eye keeps up perfectly.
Recently, with the days growing shorter and the weather turning worse, I’ve had more evening indoor scenes, and often noticed that I was overestimating the light2. I’ve now come in the habit of taking my first guess and then deducting another two stops. Haven’t had any films back though (more on that soon), so I maybe I’ll just end up with overexposed and blurred shots.
This is Ben, one of our cats. He’s about one year old now.
Shot with the Leica, of course. As you can see from the emphasized grain, the photo was slightly underexposed, but once again I was saved by the large dynamic range.
Because it’s a good, well focussed portrait of a cat. As anyone who’s ever photographed cats knows, it brings along its own difficulties. Taking a picture of a cat isn’t hard, if you don’t mind your subject being either a) sleeping, b) motion-blurred or c) not looking at you. Getting one to look at you and sit still for long enough to take a picture takes either hypnosis, skill or luck1. In this case, it was mostly the last.
Sorry for the recent draught in updates. I haven’t been home a lot, and as such haven’t had time to scan any pictures. I’ve shot plenty though.
To compensate for the lack of imagery, a bit of text today.
I’m by now not half-bad at guessing exposure with the M3, and when I’m wrong, I’m usually at least close enough that the exposure latitude of the negative can give me an acceptable picture. One thing is really throwing me though: Filters.
I’ve been experimenting a bit with differently coloured filters, and this has led to a lot of overexposure. This is mostly caused by trusting the filter factor of the filter.
Example: I’m trying to accentuate something in a picture, say, a red flower, so I take out my red filter1. The flower is in direct sunlight, so I set 1/500th of a second at f16 to start with. The filter has a 5x filter factor, so I lower my shutter speed to say, 1/125th (or open up to f8).
Result: well exposed background, over-exposed flower.
Why?2.
The filter doesn’t do much for its own colour, yet blocks its complementary colours. So the filter factor is in fact mostly applicable for colours other than the filter colour.
The right way to do it would be to maybe open up one stop from the base exposure, to highlight the primary subject. For lower filter factors, don’t open up at all.
Of course, if your primary subject isn’t the filter colour, all bets are off (and I still have to experiment with that).
But the short version is: If you’re using a filter to boost contrast by making colours darker, don’t negate that by making everything brighter.
Dante Stella has an excelent article on filters that covers this as well.
Thus ends todays lesson.
Well, the first week is over. I shot about 6 rolls, most of which were `calibration shots’: bracketing like hell and checking the contact sheets for best exposure.
Another lesson learned this week was that when Mike Johnston said to make notes, he meant it. During the calibration rolls, I made a few unbracketed shots1, guessing exposure as best as I could. In some cases, I didn’t write down what exposure I used. As Murphy dictates, those exposures were dead-on, but I have no idea what values I used…
Well, the Leica Lessons project has officially started. I shot my last frame of Velvia around midnight, and this morning at breakfast I loaded the first roll of Neopan into the Leica.
Today I’ll shoot a lot of `calibration’ frames, setting some base exposures for common lighting situations. I’m cheating a bit, using this chart to get a close guess for an Ev value and then bracketing 2 stops above and below that. Making notes along the way of course.
The final item1 needed for the Leica Lessons project is a film, a black and white film to be exact.
I wanted to use a 400 ASA film, which I’ve found is a nice all-round speed. I also wanted to use a `real’ B&W film, as opposed to a chromogenic film. In this speed, 5 types are well available to me: Kodak T-Max, Kodak Tri-X, Ilford Delta, Ilford HP5 and Fuji Neopan.
As I have absolutely no experience with B&W film, I decided to to a comparison. My demands for the final film:
For the comparison, I got two rolls of each, and shot a collection of scenes on each of them. One roll at 400 ASA, the other at 1600. I also bracketed each scene at +1 and -1 stop.
I’ll post the resulting pictures here in the near future, but the short of the story is: I didn’t see enough difference to base a valid choice on.
Since I didn’t have any real preference, a final deciding factor came into play: price. Thanks to the wonderful website Fujilab.co.uk, I can get all Fuji films in bulk, and at less than half the price I pay for other brands through normal retailers. As I have good experience with Fuji for my other films and didn’t dislike Neopan in the test shots I decided to just take the easy way out, and use Neopan 400 for my `one film’.
In addition to a camera, I also needed a lens for the Leica Lessons project. In the rules I specified this had to be a Leica lens, and as I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be using a 50mm lens.
That still leaves a lot of options.
A site that was of much value to me was this one, which list pretty much all M lenses ever made.
With mount and focal length set, one parameter left was the maximum aperture. I’ve always had good experience with the `slightly slower’ fifty, the model just below the f1.4 mainstream lens, like my Canon 50mm f1.8 or my Pentax 50mm f1.7, which strike a nice bargain between light, size/weight, image quality and price. The Leica equivalent here is the fabled Summicron.
Vain as I am, I preferred a chrome lens to go with my chrome body1. I also wanted a compact lens (one of the reasons I went for a Summicron over a Summilux).
My fondness of flower photography first had me looking seriously at the DR Summicron, but in the end I decided against that for several reasons2:
This led me back to a series of lenses that intrigued me even before I learned more about Leica lenses: Collapsible lenses. As an SLR shooter, this concept has always seemed genius to me: The ability to simply slide the lens back into the body of the camera, giving a near-flat package for transport.
Looking around, these are considered good, if slightly dated lenses, and available for reasonable prices as well. So here she is:
Leica lens 1192418, build in Wertzlar in 1954. Unlike the camera, I got this from a seller in the States, so I did get to pay a nice customs premium, but it’s in excellent condition, and came with original front and back caps3. Only downside of the American heritage is the fact that the distance scale is in feet instead of meters. However, I was always pretty good in guestimating distances in feet when I played (British) table-top games, so I don’t think it’ll really matter in the end.
Of course, to do the Leica Lessons project, I needed a Leica film rangefinder.
As I had no Leica camera, nor a rangefinder camera, I was completely free in my choice, so the first thing I did was dive into Wikipedia and find out what choices I had.
I then went over my requirements, and started scratching off options that didn’t fit:
That left the M3, M2 and M4.
After I then decided that my One Lens2 would be a 50mm, the choice became pretty easy. After all, only one camera had a perfect for 50mm 0.92x viewfinder magnification: The Leica M3.
To Ebay!
The reasons I went for this one: