Last pictures of home, first pictures of Oregon

Adjust monitor to show 16 distinct gray steps:

You are free to use these pictures in a non-commercial manner as long as you ask first and give proper attribution. I have 2K to 3K pixel scans on my hard drive if you want something larger.

These pictures were all taken on Ilford's Delta series films. The first 4 were taken on my first roll of Ilford Delta-100 Pro film, their slowest Delta film. I find myself liking this crystal-shell emulsion of thiers more and more. The grain is wonderfully fine, and the latitude for exposure is tremendous. I'd go as far as to say that the grain rivals that of Pan-F Plus! I find the Delta 400 to be an excellent general-purpose film, with quite fine grain for a film as fast as it is. There isn't much to be said about Delta 3200 that isn't obvious... When you really need film with an ISO like a bat out of hell and you don't mind the grain, it's Delta 3200 or Kodak T-Max 3200.

One thing that's annoying me is that Clayton F-76+ film developer doesn't seem to much like Delta 100 and 400 - they are coming out much, much grainier than they did with ID-11 or D-76. Maybe it's just the crystal shells, but enlarging a D-100 frame processed in Clayton chemicals to just fill an 8x10 renders the grain quite visible, a far cry short of what happened elsewhere. However, the effect seems to be either null or the opposite on Delta 3200; It's grain is at least on par with, or possibly slightly finer than, D-3200 negatives from ID-11 or D-76.

I've also discovered a way to prevent the shadows of scanned pictures from looking like crap, too: scan them @ gamma=1.0 and then change the gamma to 1.7ish using levels to avoid the static. God I need a new scanner.

My first real good wildlife picture (even if taken from inside my house, looking under a car parked 6 feet away). One day just before sunset, I walked by a window and noticed a young rabbit crouching in the shadow of dad's MR2. So, I did the natural thing: Ran and grabbed my camera and a telephoto lens.

This picture had a lot going against it. First, the camera was loaded with Delta-100 film and it was near-twilight. Second, my long lens (300mm) only opens up to F/5.6. Believe it or not, the rabbit stayed almost perfectly still for a full quarter second!

I took this photo as I was going to a realtor to drop off some papers regarding our family's house. The picture was taken on a bright, sunny day, and the cobblestone facade of the building was extremely bright. I printed the picture to drop the facade in the middle of the photo's tones, which had the cool side-affect of darkening the sky.

An offhand picture of my college's Instruction Resource Center in the morning. The missing block in the upper-right is where the sunlight hit the light-gray concrete of the IRC, burning it totally out.

This was a good picture to test the resolving ability of Delta 100 Pro, because it provided both patches of continuous tones and sharp contrast boundaries. It passed resoundingly: In the picture, I can easily read the text above the 3rd floor.

One of a series of pictures I took of some glasses sitting on aluminum foil using my zoom lens. My concept here was to see how many interesting reflections and highlights I could get in 1 picture.

These two pictures are the best of nearly an entire roll of film I used while going through the very twisty part of the I-5 that goes through the Cascades. They were taken on Delta 400 Pro, and I was experimenting with holding the camera at non-right angles to the ground to give a greater sense of the motion. In a sense, the high speed film was actually a disadvantage because the fast shutter speeds stopped all motion blur. I believe I set the aperture to F/16, and most exposures were 1/500 or 1/1000.

Taken on Delta 3200 on a cloudy night, exposure 1/4 @ F/2.8. Times like this are when I wish I had a 120 camera so I could get a better image while retaining short exposures. However, with some creative processing, the grain can become an advantage!

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