Showing posts with label Fujifilm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fujifilm. Show all posts

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Vicksburg with a Hasselblad 100mm ƒ/3.5 CSi Lens and Fuji Pro 160 NS Film (Abandoned Films 10)

After successfully completing some medical treatments, I was overcome with a serious bout of GAS. That is Gear Acquisition Syndrome, although the other gas was also present. 


Hasselblad 501CM with 100mm ƒ/3.5 Planar CSi lens and correct hood

For over five years, I used an 80mm Planar lens on my Hasselblad. But sometimes, I wanted just a bit more reach. With 35mm cameras, I liked the 55mm ƒ/1.8 Super-Takumar lens on the Pentax Spotmatic. This was just marginally longer than the more common 50mm. Hasselblad's 100mm Planar lens would provide a diagonal coverage on 6×6 approximately equal to 55mm on 35mm, so I started looking at online vendors in USA. Soon, this gorgeous 100mm ƒ/3.5 Planar CSi lens came in a big padded box from Camera West. This is a 6-element Planar design and is reputed to be the highest resolution Hasselblad lens for distant subjects.

On a foggy and drizzly January day (my favorite light), I loaded a roll of Fuji Pro 160 NS film in the holder and headed out. This is a neutral color balanced film designed for wedding, fashion, and commercial product photography. Fuji did not distribute 160NS in the USA and discontinued it in the Japan market in October 2021.  

I posted these frames at 2400 pixels wide, so click any picture to see the details. Most were tripod-mounted.


Polk Street view east, January 7, 2023, 1/15 ƒ/11
Monroe Street looking south from China Street. The former Junius Ward YMCA is to the right.
Pearl Street near Fairground Street, 1/15 ƒ/16
2521 Pearl Street, still occupied (taken from railroad tracks)
501-509 Fairground Street (taken from railroad bridge), 1/15 ƒ/16
Floodwall and Bunge Corporation, Levee Street, view south (hand-held)
1109 Mulberry Street, view east, 1/30 ƒ/11

LD's Restaurant is in a building that formerly housed a club/bar (closed several times because of shootings) and a liquor store.


Railroad yard from Levee Street - 250mm ƒ/5.6 Sonnar lens, 1/4 ƒ/22
2427 Washington Street - 80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens

I added two frames that I took with my 80mm and 250mm lenses. Hasselblad's 100mm lens is considered to be their "sharpest" (whatever that means in internet fantasy-land), but all the Zeiss lenses are superb performers. My Planar-CB is a 6-element design, in contrast to the more common 7-element models. My 250mm Sonnar is a 1960s silver barrel model with single coating, but it is just fine.



I found a very handy padded bag to hold my camera on the car seat next to me or on the floor. The rest of the kit stays in a larger camera bag. This is a Ruggard Onyx 35, only $17.95 from B&H. $17.95? That is the cost of a roll of film now. The original idea came from a WalMart lunch box that my wife suggested, but this Onyx is well-sewn and protective. Highly recommended.

Thank you all for joining me on this semi-random tour of Vicksburg.


Sunday, February 5, 2023

Summer Days in Barmouth, Wales

In 2002, my daughter said she wanted to plan the family's summer vacation. We said fine, go ahead. She chose Barmouth, Wales. Where? The town is in the county of Gwynedd, northwestern Wales, facing the Bae of Ceredigion. Well, it proved to be a brilliant choice. It feels remote from the crowds and hustle of England. We loved the geology, terrain, rugged landscape, view of the sea, and, to a lesser extent, the food. 

We flew into Heathrow and rented a right hand drive Fiat. The shifter was on the column to the left of the driver. Hmmm, shift with left hand? At least the position of the gasoline, brake, and clutch pedals are in the familiar sequence! We took the motorways north and then west across the mountains and down to the coast. I drove slowly and the locals flashed by on narrow country lanes. They probably said "Yanks" under their breath - or maybe out loud.


Barmouth and the estuary of the Afon Mawddach and Cardigan Bay.

William Wordsworth visited Barmouth in the 1800s: "With a fine sea view in front, the mountains behind, the glorious estuary running eight miles [13 km] inland, and Cadair Idris within compass of a day's walk, Barmouth can always hold its own against any rival." (from Wikipedia)


Railroad causeway across Cardigan Bay.

Barmouth blossomed when the railroad built a causeway and brought city dwellers to the town for their summer vacations. The causeway is now a splendid walking or biking path.


Slate roofs with a few modern exceptions

Almost all the construction in Wales consists of sturdy stone walls and massive slate roofs. Wales is a land of slate and shale. Quarrymen have mined and cut slate from the rugged mountains for at least 1800 years. Wales produced slate for British homes during the building boom as cities exploded during the Industrial Age. 


In the sunshine, Porkington Terrace.


The waterfront in summer is cheerful and sunny. People sit at cafes and bars on the Quay, soaking in the sun in anticipation of the gloomy winter. 


Room with a view

Barmouth was fun. This is one of the many places I want to see again. But when? There are thousand destinations yet to see in my remaining years.

These photographs are on Fuji Reala colour negative film film from my Fuji GW690II medium format camera. It has a 5-element 90mm ƒ/3.5 lens.


Sunday, May 15, 2022

Decaying Rapidly: Oil Mill of Port Gibson, Mississippi

Oil Mill, Anthony Street (4×5" Fuji Astia film, 135mm Schneider Xenar lens and too-small hood)

In late April (2022), a friend and I drove to Port Gibson, in Claiborne County, to look for interesting photo topics. We had both been to the unused oil mill on Anthony Street before and taken pictures there. But this visit, we were both amazed how the brush, poison ivy, and trees have overtaken the site and engulfed machines. Today, you can barely see through the fence, which supports luxuriant poison ivy growth. The jungle is taking over, as per many of the Life after People episodes. Here are some 2012 photographs from when the site was more visible. At that time, the gates were secure and I could not enter.

 Tachihara 4×5" camera, 135mm ƒ/3.5 Schneider Xenar lens, Fuji Astia film
Mill from corner of Anthony and Vanderhaven Streets (Fuji Astia film)

The Mississippi Cotton Oil mill may have been one of the first oil mills in the United States, with the original brick buildings dating to 1882. Preservation in Mississippi discussed the site in a short 2012 article. In the 1800s, cotton seed arrived by railroad. The rail line ran from the town of Grand Gulf to the depot in Port Gibson, but the tracks are now gone. I do not know when mill operations stopped. 

In February of 2012, I read an article in the Vicksburg Post about the mill, inspiring me to drive south to look at the site.


Disassembly of unit on Anthony Street

On that day, a crew of workers were disassembling machines on the north side of Anthony Street (the side nearest to Bayou Pierre. One of them said the machinery would be shipped to an oil company in Nigeria.


This is the view west along Anthony Street

Intact in 2012
Freshly collapsed approx. 2020 (Ilford Pan-F, Hasselblad 501CM, 50mm ƒ/4 Distagon lens, 1/8 ƒ/11.5)

The front part of this building has collapsed. The brick unit to the rear looks like it is still mostly intact.


Vandeventer Street is rough, just horrifying. Many of these shotgun houses have disappeared. 

Port Gibson has some interesting photographic topics:

The digital photographs above are from my Panasonic G1 µ4/3 camera. This was a very capable 12-mpixel camera, which I used in USA, Europe, and Nepal. Standby for some Hasselblad XPan panoramas in the future.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

The Wide View in Western Washington (Hasselblad XPan 01)

Panoramic Cameras


For years I experimented with panoramas. In the past, I took a series of photographs (usually horizontal) with a normal camera and included about 25 percent overlap on each frame. Then I mounted prints on a long board and made a physical panorama. This worked best with 50mm or longer lenses because they did not suffer from distortion or light fall-off at the edges. 

More recently, I have scanned the negatives and merged them electronically using Adobe Photoshop. The software is amazingly effective, and often you barely see the junctions where the negatives overlap at all. The quality of the merge depends on whether the lens displays darkening or unsharp areas at the edge of each frame. Regular readers may remember panoramas from Lower Manhattan and Logan Airport in Boston (click the links).

For a century, camera makers invented various types of cameras that  exposed a wide piece of film. That way, you did not need to combine separate pieces of film or glue prints on a board.

There are three main types of panoramic cameras:

  1. Stationary lens wide body. The camera body holds a wide piece of film and mounts a lens with sufficient coverage to expose the entire frame. Some examples include Former and Schwing's 7×17 and even 12×20 inch banquet cameras. Can you imagine the size of the latter monster? Mid-century, it was more common to use 6×12 and 6×17 bodies that held 120 film. Some of the best are the gorgeous Linhof models. The disadvantage of these wide bodies is that objects at the sides of the frames become elongated. Think of a round ball that becomes stretched along the axis of the film. That is why most photographers do not use wide angle lenses for group portraits - people at the edge look wide. 
  2. Rotating or swing lens cameras. These are ingenious machines. The lens is on a motorized pivot. The film back is curved, and as the lens moves, it paints the image on the film. With this design, objects at the edge do not become elongated. 
  3. 360º rotation camera. The entire camera rotates through a circle while the film moves at the same speed past the lens. One example is the famous Swiss Roundshot. These provide amazing panoramas from mountain tops or cityscapes from towers. 

An excellent introduction to this type of photography is: Meechem, Joseph,1990. Panoramic Photography, Amphoto, New York, 144p. 


Hasselblad XPan camera with 45mm ƒ/4 lens and center filter

Lens Options


Two other methods let you create panoramas with an ordinary camera.
  1. An anamorphic lens compresses the image in one direction while leaving the other unchanged. These were developed for cinematography when wide-screen movies became popular (think of Cinemascope). The film remained the normal size. At the cinema, an opposite (or anti-) anamorphic projection lens recreated the wide view that had been filmed on the set or in nature. These lenses were originally spectacularly expensive, but some Chinese companies are selling new version. 
  2. A shift lens can be mounted on any 35mm camera. Take one picture with the lens shifted full to the left, then a second frame full to the right, and merge the frames with Photoshop. I still have an Olympus OM 35mm ƒ/2.8 shift lens. I need to buy an inexpensive body and put the lens back into use.

The Hasselblad XPan


Between 1998 and 2006, Fujifilm made a spectacular camera, the TX-1 (and updated it with TX-2). Hasselblad marketed them in the USA and Canada as the XPan and XPan-2. This camera looks like a modern rangefinder body but it is wider. The film opening is 24×65 mm, in contrast to the normal 35mm camera. which exposes only 24×36 mm. Fuji made three superb lenses, 30mm, 45mm, and 90mm. The 30mm and 45mm lenses had optional center filters to even the exposure across the frame.With the recent revival in film photography, TX-1s and XPans are highly coveted and seriously expensive (a 3-lens kit complete with the center filters is a third or half the price of a new car).

Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor, Washington


The coast of Washington has two large estuaries or rias facing the Pacific Ocean. The southern one is Willapa Bay. Grays Harbor (no apostrophe in the name) is a few miles to the north. 

In 2004, I spent a few months working in Seattle on an erosion study of Willapa Bay. A friend offered to fly me to the coast, and I rented an XPan from Glazers Camera. He had a perfect airplane for the trip because the window opened (or maybe it had no window, I can't remember).

Mouth of Willapa Bay, view west to the Pacific Ocean

Willapa Bay faces the Pacific Ocean. Most of the bay is protected from the open ocean by the Long Beach Peninsula, a long sand spit composed of sediment brought down to the ocean by the Colombia River. The mouth of Willapa Bay has been very dynamic and has migrated north more than a kilometer in a century. This northward migration threatened the formerly-protected shellfish grounds used by the Shoalwater Bay Tribe and threatened their homes. 

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson created the 334-acre Shoalwater Reserve for the Willapa Bay Chinook people under the Treaty of Olympia. During the 1990s and 2000s, the village occupied by the tribe (lower right in the photograph above) suffered wave action and threat of severe erosion. The US Army Corps of Engineers conducted a study of hydrodynamics, sediment movement, and geology to evaluate if they could protect the village. If you are interested, Appendix 1, Engineering Analysis and Design of the 2009 study titled, "Shoalwater Bay Shoreline Erosion, Washington, FLOOD AND COASTAL STORM DAMAGE REDUCTION, Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation" describes the data and analyses used in the study. 

Heading north, Grays Harbor is another large estuary with a dangerous Pacific Ocean mouth. This bay was historically important for the fur trade, fishing, and the timber industry. 


Timber yard, Aberdeen

Grays Harbor's largest city is Aberdeen, located at the east end of the bay at the mouth of the Chehalis River. During the early 20th century, Aberdeen was the world's largest timber port. Much of the timber today is shipped to Asia.

Olympia



Washington State capitol, Olympia


Olympia, in Thurston County, is the capitol of Washington State. The marble dome of Capitol building is said to be the fifth highest masonry dome in the world. This a nice mid-size city, without the congestion and frenetic pace of Seattle, which is about two hours to the northeast. Olympia has a famous Farmers' Market, where you can indulge your wishes for a gastronomic overload of locally-sourced healthy vegetables and fruits. 

Tacoma


Tacoma is an industrial city at the south end of Puget Sound, about an hour south of Seattle. In the 1970s, Tacoma had major steel and paper mills. When the wind blew from the south, we smelled it in Seattle and called it "Aroma of Tacoma." Today, Tacoma has gentrified but remains a major port handling timber, bulk cargoes, petroleum products, and automobiles.   


Tacoma harbor, view west
Fisherman cottage, Tacoma (look out for the tsunami)

What a nice place for a cottage: view of the sea, clang on the buoys, swish of the waves, salty/briny smell of the intertidal flats. But when the Cascadia subduction zone finally has a big slip, the tsunami will rush into Puget Sound and wash away this little cottage. 

Browns Point, NE Tacoma

Browns Point has some nice residences on the bluff top and along the base. I do not know about geotechnical issues for the residents at the top with a view. Still, it would be nice.

Port of Tacoma

Want a car? Take you pick, all the finest from Japan and Germany.

Stand by for panoramas from Seattle in a future article. Please click any photograph to expand it. 



Monday, October 1, 2018

Rural Decay en route to Hot Springs, North Carolina

Map from ESRI ArcGIS online. Red dashed line shows the route from Asheville to Hot Springs, North Carolina.
Every year, The Vintage rally for older BMW automobiles is held in Hot Springs, North Carolina. Most participants stay in the Asheville area, so the day of the show sees hundreds of classic BMWs streaming north on I-26 and US25/US70 towards the small hamlet of Hot Springs. Once the group leaves the interstate at Weaverville, US25/US70 winds in and out of the hills, past small towns and farms, and past some occasional bits of rural decay.
This is a streamlined/moderne-style filling station, possibly once a Mobil station, but a gas station archaeologist needs to weigh in and provide an identification. 
Marshall has a number of old garages and filling stations. The main town is out of sight west of US25 and 70.
I also saw old barns or sheds in the Marshall area, slowly being engulfed by trees and vines. I usually think of Mississippi being the place where the jungle takes over, but here in wet western North Carolina, the same happens.
Further north, somewhere in Madison County, I saw a similar vine-engulfed barn during my 2017 trip.
Barn, US25, Madison County, NC.
The second photograph is a former gas station built into a house, or a house built on top of a gas station. You can see the island where the pumps were once located.
Rick's Gro, 10994 US25 (digital photograph from Fujifilm X-E1 camera).
USA Raft at 13490 US70 occupies an unusual stone-clad filling station. You can see where one of the service bays on the left was filled in. Again, I cannot identify the original fuel brand.
The Laurel River Store is a friendly place to stop for an espresso. The lady who runs it is very nice. A number of the BMW drivers stopped to tank up (with coffee, that is, but the coffee might have had enough octane for the carbureted engines).
The remains of a log trailer court cabin were to the right of the Laurel River Store. Some units beyond this building were in better shape. The vines are taking over.
Just before you reach Hot Springs, US70 crosses the French Broad River. There had been almost monsoonal rain in May of 2018, and the river was in flood, with brown water roiling angrily downstream.
Finally, Hot Springs, and the grounds of the Hot Springs Spa. The 2017 show was sunny and warm; 2018 started out dry, but by 2:30, the rain came thundering down. Regardless, a good time was had by all, and it was a good chance to check if your car leaked (mine certainly does).

The 2017 black and white photographs are from Tri-X film and a Hasselblad 501CM camera. The 2018 square frames are from long-expired Fuji NPH400 film, exposed in a Rolleiflex 3.5E camera with 75mm f/3.5 Xenotar lens.