Author Archives: Ian Andvaag

Ian Andvaag D25 submission

by Ian Andvaag

I’m a bit short on time, so my comments on my submission are a bit sparse, my apologies. My first two submissions this round are from Narrow Hills Provincial Park. I wish Fallen Pine was a half stop darker. What’s your technique for metering? I have a Pentax Spotmeter V, but I don’t think I had very good technique as many of my slides were overexposed when I used it. I mostly use a Gossen Luna Pro F nowadays, but I would like to up my game and learn how to spot meter properly. If any of you have tips or resources, I’d be glad if you’d share them with me.

Jade Lake Ridge. Tl120-1, RDP III

 

Fallen Pine, TL-120-1, RDP III

Next is Cattle Gate, from Grasslands National Park. There is an exposure mismatch that I can detect in the sky, not sure why this is as this was on my TL-120. Maybe the batteries where getting low? Has anyone else experienced this? I don’t think I’ve noticed it on other shots I’ve taken since.

Cattle Gate, TL-120-1, RDP III

Finally, a photo from the Saskatoon Exhibition. I don’t think this is as good as Bob and Timo’s slides of the fair, but I did enjoy going and taking some nighttime photos of the rides a few years ago. I wish I could control the lens flare a bit better, but I guess it comes with the territory when you shoot directly into bright lights.

Mach 3 & Water Race, TL-120-1, RVP 100

Scrutinizing Sharpness (Ian Andvaag A33)

by Ian Andvaag
For this loop, I wanted to get some feedback on sharpness. I’ve been working through some of Mike Davis’ spreadsheets and trying to determine if I’m leaving a meaningful amount of sharpness on the table by using a TL-120 or Sputnik. As I understand it, Mike’s contention is that it is not possible to get critically sharp slides with appreciable depth using standard 60-65 mm stereo base and normal FL lenses. I’m rather surprised by this contention after having seen many fantastic slides taken with TL-120s and Sputniks, but I know it’s easy for one’s eyes to be fooled, and I would guess that 95% sharpness looks close to 100% sharpness. I will say that I was particularly struck by David Lee’s Yosemite Fall slide that was included by John Thurston this loop, which seems impossibly sharp, and was not taken with a standard stereo base. I believe the proper way to investigate sharpness would be to shoot some scenes with resolution test charts at various distances and then to side by side A/B comparisons with the resulting slides in a viewer. I wish I could ask Don for advice, I know he occasionally did tests like this 🙁

 

With all this in mind, I picked out several slides which I personally believe to be quite sharp, and I would appreciate any feedback from others about any perceived lack of sharpness. Cloud Inversion should probably be considered as the “base case”. I believe the nears were around 50′ and I focused around that point, shooting at f/16 I believe. I believe this should secure more sharpness than the eye is capable of detecting in a standard viewer. I don’t really know anything about a cloud inversion, maybe this should better be called thick fog that settled into the valley.  Anyway, it was rather unexpected and interesting to see when I woke up to photograph at sunrise. There is a bit of retinal rivalry in the clouds and shadows as this is a chacha with a tripod and it takes some time to set up the tripod and adjust the framing. Apparently quite a few dinosaur fossils have been found in these badlands.

Cloud Inversion

 

I perceive Gem Lake Reflection to have a high degree of sharpness, however I don’t think it is objectively sharper than any of my other standard TL-120 slides. I believe the perceived sharpness is largely due to the adjacency effects caused by the high acutance first developer, along with the fairly visible grain.

Gem Lake Reflection

 

Bryce Hoodoo, yes this is a Sputnik shot, and there probably is some falloff in sharpness towards the corners, but I’m not sure I can detect it! Maybe the pine needles at the far right are a bit soft. This is a pretty “easy” shot to secure sharpness as the deviation is quite low, (the nears are rather far away) but I would be surprised if I changed the aperture off the default f/22 hyperfocal setting. I do think the rock and ground appear sharper than the objects in the far distance, but I’m suspecting that this is more due to the haze and lack of high spatial frequency information in the distance rather than the Sputnik having overly relaxed hyperfocal markings, although it could be both!

Bryce Hoodoo

 

Camping Breakfast was shot at f/22 using the standard hyperfocal markings on the TL-120 and I used the entire range (the near distance was 3 meters). I might be able to detect the smallest lack of sharpness in the specular highlight on the blue water bottle, but I’m not sure. I think the exposure was 1/8 of a second, so the people are probably not perfectly sharp. Yes it was posed!

Camping Breakfast

 

In my opinion, Cloud Inversion does seem ever so slightly sharper than the others, but I’m not entirely convinced it is because of the more conservative DOF tolerance, but rather that the size of the plants at this distance provides a fairly high frequency subject and the low angle of the sun provides fairly high contrast, while non-hyper shots typically have inherently less high frequency detail.

 

So what do you think? Do you use the standard hyperfocal settings on your lenses? Or do you stop down one extra stop? Or some other technique? Ok, enough nerd talk. Sorry to ruin a perfectly good post with all this talk of sharpness! I certainly don’t think it’s the most important aspect of a successful MF3D shot, but it is fun to discuss.

Ian Andvaag’s D24 submission

by Ian Andvaag

For this round, I set aside fifteen or so slides and asked a few people to suggest which four I should submit. There wasn’t perfect agreement, but I think these four came out on top.

I was inspired by Paul Gillis’ D22 submission “Drill, Grind & Dry” to try some more still life in MF3D, as I think it has been somewhat underrepresented in the folio. This view of the breakfast table at Easter was taken from a pretty unconventional perspective, but I wanted to limit the far point so I wouldn’t record too much on-film deviation. I had hoped to mount the image with the orange juice protruding through the window, but I was thwarted by the fruit bowl being closer to the camera. Oh well, the window isn’t so important in MF3D anyway.

Easter Breakfast

In 2018, some friends and I went on a road trip to Utah — it’s about the closest place that you can get decently warm weather in April. We did a lot of hiking, and I wanted to keep weight down so I brought my Sputnik rather than my TL120. I also didn’t bring a light meter, so this one turned out a bit darker than I’d hoped.

Staircase Escalante, UT

My last two submissions this round are from one of Saskatchewan’s National Parks, called Prince Albert National Park. It is better known as Waskesiu, which is the name of the lake where the town-site and cabins are located.  This slide was taken on a 7 km trail quite near to the town-site.

Fisher Trail Waskesiu

Our campground at Waskesiu had several bright yellow lady’s slippers in bloom. The weather was punishingly hot, and so we spent a fair bit more time in our campsite rather than hiking. I challenged myself to shoot a full roll on the lady’s slippers. A question to all the close-up aficionados — how do you get enough depth of field to get everything sharp in medium format? I believe that I am well under MAOFD with this slide, but I can’t get everything sharp at f/22 unless I use a conventional depth range of 3-4 meters to infinity. Should I try to shoot with the camera pointed straight down to limit the distance of the background? When indoors, a wall can be used to limit the depth, but often I find it challenging to come up with a pleasing composition outdoors which has a limited depth range.

Lady’s Slippers

Jim Roy’s D23 submission

by Ian Andvaag

Note: I’ve had some issues getting Jim signed up on the site, so I’m posting this description he sent to me. -Ian Andvaag

Newly included slides are mostly taken with a Sputnik acquired from Paul Gillis, but badly metered on a dark snowy day. They are “Bit of Snow” taken at our first snowstorm, “Ultimate Rest”, taken at our nearest apartment trash fort and hydrant, “A Little Snow” on Woodrow Wilson Boulevard just outside our apartments, and “Netherlands Memorial Lions”, taken at Marine Memorial Park’s Netherlands Carillon (recently restored) with a hand held Rolleiflex in the 1990s. I wish I still had that camera, since I reduced my camera pile from 88 in 2004 to “only” 28 today. The only 120 film ones left are a 1960 vintage Sputnik, 1930 giveaway cardboard Kodak 50th Anniversary, and a 1926 Rolleidoscop which needs repair.

Jim Roy

Bit of Snow

Ultimate Rest

A Little Snow

Netherlands Memorial Lions

Nik Sekhar A32 Submission

by Ian Andvaag

[This post was created by Ian Andvaag on August 2, 2023 to create a place for people to leave comments on Nik Sekhar’s slides. It has been dated to February 4, 2022 which is when Nik had the folio.]

 

[Flowers Close-Up]

 

[Front Yard]

 

[Nik’s Son Holding Cat]

 

[Star Wars Birthday Cake]

Ian Andvaag A32 submission

by Ian Andvaag

Boreal Floor. Velvia 100, TL120.

From the Esker. Provia 100F, TL120 cha-cha

Two of my contributions to this loop, Boreal Floor and From the Esker were taken at Narrow Hills Provincial Park in northern Saskatchewan. The latter was taken from an esker (ridge of earth pushed up by the last glacier) that runs along the park. It provides a nice vantage point looking over the boreal forest and numerous small lakes. Here I attempted a hyper stereo with my TL-120 by covering one lens and moving the tripod about a metre between exposures. There was a significant amount of smoke from wildfires in the area when I last visited the park, so unfortunately the sky was washed out and featureless in all of my slides.

 

 

Crested Wheat Corral. Superpan 200, reversal processed in D67. TL-120 with Hoya R72 filters.

Web. Provia 100F, TL120.

The other two images were taken at Grasslands National Park very near the Saskatchewan-Montana border. Crested Wheat Corral is in the west block of the park where the remains of several small ranches can be found. The area is very arid, and ranchers tried tilling the soil to improve the pasture, but this turned out to be a poor practice. They introduced Crested Wheatgrass (native to Russia) to the disturbed soil with limited success, but it did prevent further erosion. Large portions of the park still contains undisturbed virgin prairie, which is probably one of the most disturbed landscape types on the globe due to its agricultural usefulness. It’s somewhat off-topic for MF3D, but I made a surprisingly successful silver gelatin print from this slide by making an internegative. I think that this approach yields much better results than a direct reversal print.

Web was taken in the East block of the park in the early morning sunlight. I’ve been trying to branch out a bit and experiment with limited depth of field shots, in particular close-ups. I’m not sure if I’ve found much success. I think the image could have been improved by stopping down another stop to get a faster shutter speed, as I was not able to freeze the web’s motion in the gentle breeze, despite waiting several minutes for the wind to die down.

 

Ian Andvaag’s D23 submission

by Ian Andvaag

Jade Lake (Narrow Hills Provincial Park, SK)

The last round I submitted a couple images I took at Narrow Hills Provincial Park, but not at this location. This is a lovely location in the North West section of the park with seven small (but very deep) lakes with very clear water. They are called the Gem Lakes, so-named for their rich blue and green colours. A network of trails runs around the lakes with several camping locations. I pitched my tent at the Diamond Lake site for two nights, which gave me a full day from dawn to dusk to photograph the area. The trails only total a length of about 6 km, so I did about 3 loops around the lakes throughout the day. This is a high spot overlooking Jade Lake. The spruce tree in the foreground is perhaps a bit gratuitous or cliche, but I thought it looked pretty and gave a good impression of what it is like to look down at the lake from the trail. The film is Delta 100, home-developed in D-67 reversal.

Meewasin Trail – Fall (Saskatoon, SK)

Meewasin Trail – Winter (Saskatoon, SK)

This is a section of trail quite near to my apartment in Saskatoon. It’s not the most remarkable location, but due to its proximity, I do get the opportunity to photograph it a lot (although I haven’t been recently). It’s the location I go to when there is some interesting light from a clearing storm or when there is hoarfrost in the winter before it gets blown off in the wind. The power plant and waste water treatment plant discharge into the river about 15 km upriver, so this section never completely freezes over. I thought the two images contrast each other nicely, although perhaps it’s a bit too repetitive since they are both taken from nearly the same perspective.

Tundra Swan (Wascana Waterfowl Park, Regina, SK)

In my hometown of Regina, there is a bird sanctuary beside the creek. There are some “display ponds”, but the grounds are really not that attractive. Although the birds are not captive, they are not easily frightened since they are used to being fed. In the shade it was rather dim using ISO 100 film, and I really was at the limit of what I could manage in terms of exposure. Handheld Tl120, not sure of the exposure settings, perhaps 1/60 and f/8. The shutter speed wasn’t enough to freeze the swan. There wasn’t enough DOF to cover the background or the foreground, but it wasn’t particularly interesting, so I just cropped it out. Next time I’ll hopefully have a flash with me, or maybe I’ll consider pushing Provia. I enjoy viewing these type of “action shots”, but I find them very challenging to take!

James Roy’s d22 submission

by Ian Andvaag

Marine Memorial Park – D.C. from west

Augusta – Maine Capital Building – most northeastern capital – Maine’s 16 counties got statehood from 1820 with Missouri Compromise

Out West – maybe Wyoming – somewhere near Four Corners

Near Maroon Bells – same park – all pairs handheld with TLR

James Roy’s submission for loop d22.