Haven’t posted a portrait of Akuri for a while. Here’s two.

Fujifilm Neopan 100 Acros in Xtol

A few test shots from my first roll of tri-x 400… developed in DD-X for 8 mins with ilford fixer. 100% scans show very fine grain for a 400 film. Sharpness doesn’t compare to say Fuji Acros (100) but when I got it right, it looked v good. I read that the DDX development is a similar effect to xtol (fine grain effect). I printed the last shot at 19″x13″ tonight (via scanning) and was blown away. I’m constantly amazed at the resolving power of medium format. Makes going back …

The last images I’ll share from the first two rolls of film I shot with the Pentax 67ii last weekend (and have been posting this week). It turned out to be a great coulpe of rolls – with a usable hit rate of about 80% from just 20 shots. Normally I hover around 3 – 4 shots out of 12 (for 6×6 MF) or 8 – 12 shots for a 35mm roll of 36 shots – so this was substantially higher. Will be interesting to see if I get anything …

Happy New Year everyone.
OK this is the last in the series… Just a few shots of my little family as we made our way down the coast. As I’ve already said a dozen times, it was a wonderful four day trip and I intend to do it several times more over the next 12 months. I’m delighted with the shots I took over the week – only the second time I’ve ever felt strongly (i.e. brave enough) to bring only film equipment with me on a trip… I’ll never stop …

Day 4 consisted of waking up early in the morning in Susanville, and simply heading back. Despite being having driven more than 12 hours the previous day, we still had a 9+ hour journey ahead of us and as with much of our short break, we didn’t have too much time for stopping and photography. On the way back we did want to choose one place to stop however and that ended up being a little park in Lassen National forest. After a short break there, and a few photos, …

I recently wrote about an adapter I bought for my 5D which allowed me to mount my old Olympus OM Zuiko lenses on it. In that post, I provided a couple of samples with a normal range 55mm f/1.2. Here’s a quick update with a longer lens – the Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm f/2.8, with a particular emphasis with how it performs with a Canon 5D Mark II.
I’m a big fan of the old Olympus Zuiko lenses which have a few interesting characteristics:

They are very compact
They can be cheap …

Day 3 was actually the purpose of the trip. Woke up at 5am and drove 20 minutes from the campsite to a place called Badwater. This is the lowest point in the US, and during the summer some of the hottest temperatures of anywhere in the world are experienced. The flats of Badwater stretch for miles. Due to the extreme climate, very little water and / or life is sustained and you can walk unimpaired in pretty much all directions. When rain does fall, it goes through a freeze–thaw and …

Day 2 started by leaving Reno in the morning and driving 8 hours South, stopping off for occasional leg stretching, photoshooting and a rosie lee. At around 6pm we arrived at the top of Death Valley National Park and began the 30 minute decent into the park. Being a man who doesn’t like to overplan these sorts of things, I hadn’t arranged a parking spot at the campground (for which we had no camping gear anyway). After 24 hours of driving over two days, I started to look a little …

Day 1 of our thanksgiving road trip consisted of nearly a thousand miles of driving over 15 or so hours. Starting out from Seattle, we had breakfast in Portland, cut across and reached Bend, OR by the afternoon and finally Reno, NV by 11pm. Focused on covering ground rather than shooting, I actually took only a handful of pictures on the way down – but here are the first day images.
All shots taken with an Olympus OM-4 + Zuiko lenses on Kodak Ektar 100. Scanned with Nikon’s Coolscan 5000.

An …

Most of you who are familiar with my pictures will already know recognise Akuri from my pictures. Well recently, she’s been active behind the camera, making use of one of my Olympus OM-1’s. Here are a few pictures from her from the past couple of months… It’s interesting – our house has been filled with the best DSLR equipment in the past 5 years yet Akuri’s never really picked up a camera with much interest. It took an old dusty OM-1 lying around to get her on the photographer side …