EJK's Desktop: Photography 1

You are free to use these pictures in a non-commercial manner as long as you ask first and give proper attribution. If you want a larger image, contact ejkeever AT nerdshack DOT com; I have all pictures stored at roughly 3000x2000 or higher resolution. Please give a short explanation of your intended use and details of what specific size/file format.

My photographic equipment is fairly basic. I use a Minolta X-700 SLR camera. It was the first that could go anywhere from full-autoexpose to fully manual. Most of the time, I use aperture-priority unless the lighting would confuse the meter. I have an MD-Rokkor 50mm f/1.4 for standard use because of it's great optical quality. I also have two 28mm lenses for wide angle, and a 75-300mm zoom that I rarely use. My favorite films include Ilford Pan-F Plus, the Ilford Delta films, Fuji Neopan Acros and Neopan-1600. I also tend to buy a few rolls of novel films at random when buying a block of mainstays.

In the darkroom, I have a Beseler 23cII enlarger that I got a superb deal on. I prefer FB paper, even though it is significantly slower to process than RC. I believe that it does a better job of capturing fine tonal differences, and know that it has superior archival qualities. Chemically, I tend to try something new in developers every time the last chemicals run out. The rest of them are fairly standard to me, since they all do the same thing with no visual effect (reduce pH, dissolve silver halides, remove solvent). I've found that many developers render Pan-F poorly, with an extremely narrow exposure margin, though Ethol-TEC seems to work well if you give the film a bit more than normal exposure.

The lower gallery numbers are the originals, the higher numbers are later pictures. The latest pictures I have printed are in gallery 12. So if you don't like what you see here, take a look at a gallery in the double-digits.

For an optimal view, adjust your monitor's brightness and contrast so that the horizontal rule shows 16 distinct gray steps.

The story of this picture begins with Scratch Holograms. These are created when, in short, you create a very large number of scratches in a piece of plastic that (when viewed with a highly directional light) create a three dimensional image. The next part of the story is my homebrew photo enlarger, where I simply use a 28MM camera lens in reverse. One day I noticed the interesting patterns that these holograms projects if you put them in my projector. Thus, we arrive at the abstract picture. This is a picture of maybe one square inch of the hologram (which is 3.5 x 5.5 inches). The hologram itself was a crude 3D graph of speed, time, and distance.

This is a "daylight print" of the print below. It was made by placing the original (Black & White) print in a contact printer emulsion down with a piece of unused photo paper that was emulsion up. I printed this one for approx. 5 minutes in direct sunlight. The resulting image is very low-contrast and exhibits coloring based on the amount of light it was hit with. This picture was never developed but put directly in the fixer. One other note: if it gets wet, the image gets much lighter and then returns the instant it dries. Can any chemistry majors fill me in? Hydrate complex?

This is the normal print of the image above. The film was Ilford Pan-F+ ISO 50, shot at F/16 on a 28MM lens. IIRC, the film exposure was about 5 seconds (This was taken in the early morning). This picture demonstrates why I love Pan-F+: It's a 5X7 crop from a negative that was enlarged to almost a yard across. The amount of detail it captures is astounding!

Filmed on Ilford Pan-F+, F/16, 28MM lens. Exposure was about 1/2 second. The lighting comes from a monstrous studio light held just off the left of the image. This a whole frame of Pan-F+ printed onto a 5X7. The original contains details at least 3 times smaller than visible here.

Shown here is a 1X1 inch section of the above photo. It's truly amazing how much detail Pan-F+ captures. Truly amazing...

Another nice image shot onto Pan-F+. Taken with a zoom lens, somewhere around 150MM and F/16, exposure around .5 seconds. Very high contrast image; taken late in the day, with there was extreme contrast between light vs dark.

This is a long-esposure star-trail picture taken back in march 2003. Exposure was ~30 minutes. It was taken from the parking lot at Mt. Pinos, about an hours's drive north of me. I didn't have a mount for the camera at the time, so I simply *ahem* laid the camera down, lens straight up, and used a cable release to hold the sutter open. IIRC, it was ISO 400 film.

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