Question For You Photographers

[toobfreak]

My question would be: Why guide manually?

With digital using a CCD camera with high QE, you can get away with very short exposures of only a few minutes, take several images that way then "stack" them (mathematically sum the data) into one effective long exposure. To shoot deep sky with emulsion, you are looking at hours of exposure in one contiguous shot. To do that effectively, you need a guide scope at a much higher power than the camera sees so that you can detect drift early and either electrically guide it with a tracking device that detects drift of the target star and feeds a FB signal to the mount to correct it, or the old school way--- sit there and make corrections manually using a special eyepiece.
Any mount no matter how good has some periodic error in the gears requiring some sort of corrections. Then there are other problems with the mounts which become more intrusive as the length of the exposure increases.

 

[toobfreak]

Sable, Pappy and all, you tell some really great stories! There is no beating digital, but to those of us who had to do things the old way on film because that is all there was, stuff like the matte shots you describe which is a simple thing with digital now, next to impossible and so difficult with film, you learned an appreciation of problem-solving skills in finding ways of getting things done that translates to today that younger people only knowing digital and never having faced such issues will just never appreciate.
Much like an old instructor of mine who worked on ENIAC, one of the very first computers where you had to hard wire connections between thousands of vacuum tubes to set up the calculation to be done, or even programming on a KIM-II, people today have no idea what they have in their hands the real technology when they press buttons on their smartphone! It is all taken for granted.
As far as film, if I shoot film these days it is mainly because it just saves me a lot of money. I have far too much invested in film equipment, lens, etc., that to sell them, I would loose too much money and I won't give the stuff away, and to replace it all with modern auto-focus ESM lenses and digital bodies would cost a fortune! I have 17 lenses for Canon 35mm alone all of which were among some of the best and most specialized. I have a digital body and general purpose zoom now that handles most everyday things but for special needs, extreme wide angle which I like to shoot for scenery, long telephoto, or very low light or needing high-power flash, remote control, macro, etc., it is much cheaper to use the film gear I already have then digitize the negatives for post-processing.
Plus, it is still nice to stay in touch with that "other world" of film which is so different than digital; the shame is much like how CD's replaced LP's just as LP records were hitting their prime, film was largely abandoned for digital at a time when new film emulsions were coming out that were better than anything ever seen in the past.

 

[woodsroad]

I spent many years shooting film. With digital I make better pictures, faster. That's what matters to me.

 

[sablebrush52]

the shame is much like how CD's replaced LP's just as LP records were hitting their prime, film was largely abandoned for digital at a time when new film emulsions were coming out that were better than anything ever seen in the past.

That's been said of silent film being cut off by the development of sound, and it's a pretty good observation, funny as it sounds.
When I was an active matte painter there were only a handful worldwide who could successfully do this kind of work. It required an eye and a sense for emulsions and lenses and how they "saw" light. That sense was something innate that couldn't be taught. The mechanics could be taught, but not the sense. If you ever looked at an actual matte painting you might be shocked to find that they don't look at all real. They just photograph as real.
But the other point:

stuff like the matte shots you describe which is a simple thing with digital now, next to impossible and so difficult with film, you learned an appreciation of problem-solving skills in finding ways of getting things done that translates to today that younger people only knowing digital and never having faced such issues will just never appreciate.

Is partially true and partially not. As technology eases limitations the bar gets raised. Matte paintings in one sense ARE much simpler to do because there are second chances and applications like VUE that create fractal based "photorealistic" terrain instead of a brush wielder like me creating it from scratch. But it still takes a very good eye to use the new tools successfully.
What isn't needed is that sense for "reading" emulsions and lenses, and knowing how to make just the right mark on a surface to fool both. And now the camera can fly through the environment, which creates both increased creative and story telling opportunities, and also creates increased headaches and demands. The best I could hope for was multiplaning or using a nodal point mount to introduce camera movement. But I couldn't change the station point.
Problems always arise, regardless of the technology, it's the nature of the specific problem and problem solving that changes. Though the environment changes, the logic of problem solving doesn't change very much. And while it's fair to say that many practitioners won't have the kind of knowledge that I have and won't know what they don't know, I'm not sure how much that matters. How many of us ever tried our hand at Daguerreotypes?
Much of the framework of that knowledge is carried forth through the features of the applications that have been created for a digital environment. What we called "matte logic" still applies.
What is lost is a sense of immediacy of experience as there is exactly nothing tangible in digital. A digital artist might read my experiences on Lonesome Dove, but will likely never experience anything similar first hand.

 

[toobfreak]

I'll throw in a few more last images that some of you might find interesting as it diverges a bit from anything else discussed so far and probably closest to some of the stuff Sable has mentioned he does or used to do, image restoration.
Here is a picture of a music hall in Spain. The original image was part of an advertisement and had a huge banner across the top blocking out part of the ceiling from the middle of the stained glass over to the left. It also had the bottom tenth or so blocked out with more images.
I reconstructed the missing parts rebuilding the missing area of the stained glass ceiling and complex ceiling structures to the left as well as recreated the missing areas along the bottom, the seating, railings and so forth from what was available in the picture.
The original file was a huge tagged image file I converted to jpeg and greatly reduced in size for viewing here and slightly reprocessed for best presentation on this page. You can get a sense of it but the image is far too small to appreciate the fabulous detail, but I just had to have this picture as this is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen and I could find no other picture exactly like this taken from this vantage!

On a similar vane, something else I've screwed around with a little bit is restoring damaged old photos; here is a couple of before and after pictures of a lady I did once, her wedding photos or something, badly ripped, torn, written on and all kinds of other damage, plus fading, etc. Again, too small to really see all of the work here, but it gives an idea--- much of the repair was done at the pixel level.
Here is the first before / after:

And here is the second:

This second one was a lot harder to fix than it might have seemed as the shading and lighting is so gradual and ever-changing there is no place to hide your work, though the first picture needed more overall repair. Hope you enjoyed.

 

[indianafrank]

sable and pappy your stories are amazing. Thanks for sharing!
toobfreak, I loved the pics.

 

[pappymac]

I shoot digital now and I have been using Photoshop since it first came out back in the late 80s/early 90s. I do miss working in black & white though and have yet to see digital photos with the same quality - IN MY OPINION - to properly exposed and processed black & white film. The attached is a portrait I shot of my father about 8 years before he died. I used a Nikon F2, Tri-X 400 and made the shot with available light.
Well. I was going to post the photo but photobucket seems to have problems and I can't sign in.

 

[pappymac]

that didn't work.

 

[sablebrush52]

I've done some image restoration for fun, like these that I did for a friend.
Here's the scan of the original Ektachrome transparency:

Here's the restoration that I did, not perfect but an improvement. I manipulated the densities of the color records and then added a few steps for reducing the greenish flare along the right side:

And here's another from The Rifleman:

And the rebalance, which could be better, but I was doing this as a quick freebie favor:

I have done a little film restoration as when I was involved in restoring a Jimi Hendrix performance for the 25th Anniversary release of Woodstock.

 

[pappymac]

Got it this time. I think.

 

[sablebrush52]

Great Shot! Pappy!

 

[jpmcwjr]

All very interesting images and text. Thanks, gents.
And, Jesse, was the Rifleman mostly WB and a tad of exposure?

 

[sablebrush52]

And, Jesse, was the Rifleman mostly WB and a tad of exposure?

Hi John,
I don't understand the post.

 

[jpmcwjr]

Jesse-
Was the rework of the photo from The Rifleman, the one of the cowboy and girl, mostly white balance (color correcting) and exposure correction?

 

[jpmcwjr]

Here's a B-W photo I took in 1957 in Mexico. Nothing fancy, but I just like it a lot.

 

[toobfreak]

My father never went past B&W, his photos were amazing. He shot a lot of action documenting WWII but in private life when the push came for color, he just was not interested in revamping his darkroom and learning a whole new process, so I never learned color either. How is color darkroom compared to B&W? Is is much harder?

 

[jpmcwjr]

Waaaaay more complex.

 

[toobfreak]

Sable, I love the pictures! Any idea who the lady is with Bill Bixby?
Pappy, your dad looks like he sure could tell a few stories.

 

[warren]

I did black and white, color negs and E-6 in my home darkroom. Steps were about the same, in memory with temps being more critical I think.
Color printing was frustrating in that the prints were tumbled or rolled in a tank. I liked seeing the image develop in the glow of a red light. But, color was no more difficult or easier than B/W in my experience. I never really liked any chrome except for Kodachrome so, didn't do all that much developing of transparencies.

 

[sablebrush52]

Was the rework of the photo from The Rifleman, the one of the cowboy and girl, mostly white balance (color correcting) and exposure correction?

Got it. The correction required a bit more advanced approach. The image has suffered a structural failure, so a structural restoration is needed. Since the Red record fades in ektrachrome, getting the image back to something that can be further refined requires reconstituting the Red record. This I did using channel operations - CHOPs - to alter the density structure of the Red record in a consistent manner by multiplying it. This increases the density and also the range of values in the Red record. Further spot adjustments could be made to further restore balanced color prior to making other adjustments. Unfortunately, there is a limit. If the Red record has completely faded out, it can't be restored. You would have to create a Red record. Doable, but not easy.
John, nice picture, BTW

Sable, I love the pictures! Any idea who the lady is with Bill Bixby?

She was a cast member on My Favorite Martian so you should be able to find her name by looking it up on the imdb.