December 2015 – tim dobbs photography

I have always fancied shooting a half-frame camera after seeing a lot of interesting image compositions on various webpages.

I was looking forward to trying to find subjects that could be paired together to make a different image than just single frames.

It was not really all that easy to do as I found out but I did manage to get a few keepers out of 72 frames, I also found out that hand holding the little Pen D at 1/30th second was not very successful in quite a few of the frames.

That said it was a very enjoyable experience with the camera and the zone focus didn’t prove to be a problem either with all the images being in focus except for the camera shake ones.

There does appear to be a slight light leak which showed up in a few frames so I will have to sort that before shooting more film.

I was really impressed with the sharpness of the images considering the small size of the negative, obviously they will be limited to the enlargement size but for up to 7 x 5 (maybe 10 x 7) they are great.

Once we get a brighter day I hope to shoot a roll of colour film just to experiment with trying to pair up colours as well as subjects.

Thanks for looking.

Click on an image to view larger…..

You can also find my film only stuff over at https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/ if you want to see more film loveliness …..

The weather this weekend here in the South Wales valleys has been awful, Dark & very wet.

A walk up the mountain was out of the question but as luck would have it the Garw Valley Railway had an open day so knowing from past visits the light inside the shed was very low I loaded the Nikon F100 with some HP5 and pushed it to iso 3200 and used the AF-s 50mm f1.4.

Even shooting at 3200 I was having to open up the lens to f2.8 or wider to get a reasonable shutter speed so the sharpness I managed to get was pretty impressive.I have pushed HP5 before and I knew that the contrast/grain it produces would suit the type of subjects I was shooting.

The only disadvantage to pushing this much was losing the highlights but it didn’t spoil any of the shots really.I processed the film in Ilford ilfotec HC 1+15 dilution for 11 minutes agitating twice every minute which managed to keep the grain well in check while giving excellent sharpness.

HP5 is such an excellent film stock its so versatile in in my personal opinion looks better when pushed than box speed but I love deep blacks and contrasty/grainy images so it suits me.

I had 3 frames left when I got home and fired them off in the house wide open just as a test and to finish the roll so I could see the results.

The combination of the F100 and the af-s 50mm f1.4 is great the focus is spot on and the lens is so sharp. Thanks for looking

Click on an image to view larger …..

You can also find me at https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/ which is all film only loveliness …

Month: December 2015

Olympus Pen D ….1st time shooting Half-Frame ………

Garw Valley Railway with an F100 & some HP5 @ 3200…..