Some pictures from my film era - ME Super, Coolscan 5000 ED

that's the best yet.
That looks properly cold and I would never know that was a scan.
If you increase the contrast until the trees are silhouetted it looks more contemporary, but I prefer the cold misty air and lower contrast of this one.

Very much so. As it happens, this shot is one of my favourites from those days, and there's a 20x30 print from it on one of my walls.

There's no significant grain in the print at all, but here's a 100% crop of the scan - the tree at centre background in the above picture. It's unedited, just reduced from 16 bit TIFF to 8 bits, and saved as max quality JPEG.

The film was Konica, 100 ASA.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/140-000b-crop.jpg[/IMG]

Also, for this frame only, I did the very slow 16x superfine scan, that scans each bit 16 times to average out any noise. So I'm guessing that really is the grain, or whatever the equivalent of grain is, for colour film.

Thanks, although I'm still pretty much using the default settings.

Hmm. What colour is the cast you're seeing? I can sort of convince myself there's something there, but I'm far from sure.

Its the natural green-ish blue-ish colour cast that comes with the time of day. Specially with this sort of scenes. Nothing to do with camera settings. My suggestion was only meant as a way to enhance the overall appearance. Strictly personal of course.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/133-017-800.jpg[/IMG]

I took this in November 1988. I still like the expression I captured, but I'm not sure about the pose. I could probably have done with a reflector, but I didn't know about such things then. Her husband still has this photo on his desk, twenty years later, so I must have done something right.

Does the resting on her hand work, or does her arm look a little disconnected? It strikes me differently each time I look at it...

Is it worth putting a little more effort into the noise reduction?

I think they all tend a wee bit to the cyan side of things which may just be down to the age of the film. I've found that 30 year old Kodachrome is as good as new but some rolls of Ektachrome are unusable (particularly the one processed by me :blush

Interesting. Which of these do you think looks better?

The one on the left is the same as before, just half the size. The one on the right has Cyan/Red balance +20 away from cyan.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/133-017-800-TwoVersions.jpg[/IMG]

A couple from the top of Helvellyn, looking down at Striding Edge on a hot June day, early afternoon:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-007.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-005.jpg[/IMG]

A view of the Grisedale valley, from about half way along Striding Edge:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-024.jpg[/IMG]

And the legendary Bowder Stone. Possibly the most over-photographed view in the Lakes:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/165-028-BowderStone.jpg[/IMG]

I remember being incredibly disappointed when I got the prints back from this holiday. I'd been using a rubber lens hood which caused terrible vignetting. Before cropping and contrast-adjustment was possible, the whole lot was basically junk. Now, though, although far from stellar, a surprising amount is salvageable.

I'm *so* not going back to film.

I prefer the original of the two portraits. More subtle.

And I agree totally with your point about being able to make silk purses from what were apparently sows' ears. It's one of the reasons why more people are producing more good pictures than they did in film days. It's the Control element of my Three Cs argument for using digital.

Haven't been up Helvellyn since the early sixties. T'anks fer de memory.

G

Grand Canyon, May 1990.

This was from the light twin on the way from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/182-020.jpg[/IMG]

A couple from the South Rim:

To give you a sense of scale, the Colorado river there is 300 yards wide. The canyon is about a mile deep.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/183-011.jpg[/IMG]



This one just after sunset. The North Rim is 11 miles away.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/183-019.jpg[/IMG]



And one on the way back to Vegas:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/186-010.jpg[/IMG]


It was the most amazing scenery I'd ever seen. The photos I took didn't come anywhere near capturing the immensity of it, and nor, strangely, did just looking at it from the top. I found I had to hike down into the canyon for a few hours to really start to get my head round it. I resolved to go back there to have another go at photographing it, but it hasn't happened yet.