Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Jen


Mamiya C330, f/2.8 at 1/30th of a second with Fuji ISO 400 color negative film.


Taken with a Mamiya C330 TLR (medium format film camera), this looks slightly different than the normal sharp and clear results this camera is known for. Visually, it has more in common with a cheap Holga camera. Why?

The simple answer is 'It's a digital photograph of a negative'. Rather than trundle over to the university and spend 20 minutes waiting for the flatbed film scanner to do its job, I simply put a strobe with a shoot-through umbrella on a stand (the umbrella was used to diffuse the strobe, otherwise there'd be un-even lighting on the negative), held the negative up and took a picture. Then imported into Photoshop, and used curves to render the negative as a positive, with a few other adjustment layers for color balance and vibrance.

The fact that the negative wasn't perfectly flat when photographed makes the lower left corner darker than it should be, and the strobe probably made it more grainy looking than a flatbed light would have.

All in all though, it works.

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