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For those who appreciate water shots:







No post production involved. Vignette achieved by putting a 135mm lens hood on a 28mm lens.

Hi Mate. Firstly welcome to the forum.

The images are different I'll give you that. You've got a nice silky water effect in all of them, and I think the vignette suits that shot. I have to ask though, the colours look very yellow.

Look forward to seeing some more.

Cheers,
Owen.

owen wrote:Hi Mate. Firstly welcome to the forum.

Thanks.

The images are different I'll give you that. You've got a nice silky water effect in all of them, and I think the vignette suits that shot. I have to ask though, the colours look very yellow.

The silky effect was what I was aiming for. I took the shots with exposure times of 1-2 seconds. I experimented with the vignette a couple of times (more to come).

Yes, the colours are very yellow in a few of the shots. That's a result of using Kodak Royal 25 ASA (a noble film which is sadly no longer made), and partly due to the long exposure time.

I was happy burning out the background for the sake of the water in the foreground.

Look forward to seeing some more.

I should stitch these together:

The other vignette shot:



A faster shot:



I like this camera. Shots like these are why I still have it.

Good to see you over here Fortigurn, welcome! Love all these shots, silky smooth water always gets me. The yellow cast is slightly annoying, might be worth a couple of minutes in PS to get rid of it, but despite the cast the shots (particularly the first one, where the background isn't blown out so the whole frame looks 'rich') still work well. Thanks for posting!

I really like the second shot and the last shot. Where were they taken? Which camera did you use that you like so much?

Thanks guys. I actually wanted the yellow look, because it captured the slightly gold glow in the scene as the afternoon light started to fade (it was a winter afternoon, between 3 and 4pm).

Now for the details:

• Location: Cataract Gorge, Launceston (Tasmania), while the gorge was in flood (that's a concrete bridge you're looking at, which people normally walk across)
  
• Film: Kodak Royal Gold (25 ASA), a beautiful ultrafine grain film with massive colour saturation, which I miss sorely
  
• Filters: neutral colour skylight, neutral colour daylight, and a rotating polarizer at full intensity (a total of 5.5 f-stops all together)
  
• Lenses: 55mm and 28mm
  
• Additional equipment: Ancient Velbon tripod (heavy aluminium, very stable)
  
• Speeds: 1-2 seconds (1, 1.5 and 2)
  
• Aperture: f5.6
  
• Camera: Pentax Spotmatic

This was my first camera, a fully manual Pentax Spotmatic with only a very basic inbuilt light meter to guide me. I worked out all the shots by taking a good look at the scene and calculating the f-stops and speeds with a piece of paper (ignoring the light meter).

I still have this camera. It's about 30 years old now, and was maybe 20 years old when I took these.

MCWB wrote:Good to see you over here Fortigurn, welcome! Love all these shots, silky smooth water always gets me. The yellow cast is slightly annoying, might be worth a couple of minutes in PS to get rid of it, but despite the cast the shots (particularly the first one, where the background isn't blown out so the whole frame looks 'rich') still work well. Thanks for posting!

That first one I really do like myself. I did enjoy burning out the background in the other shots, just for the sake of the silky water in the foreground (this was while I was following Peter Dombrovskis' photography, and experimenting with water shots), but I wanted that shot to be evenly saturated, and I really love how it turned out.

not sure if it's the monitor i'm looking at but the shots look really moody, the first one is my fav but the last one has better silky smooth water.
well done

wendellt wrote:not sure if it's the monitor i'm looking at but the shots look really moody, the first one is my fav but the last one has better silky smooth water.
well done

Do you mean moody as in dark? It could be the monitor, or the scanning job I did on them (they were scanned a few years ago, and I didn't really scan them at a high enough resolution, nor did I save them at a high enough resolution - I had a lot to learn back then).

Thanks for the encouragement.

When I first looked I thought, that looks really filmy. Then I started looking for traces of digital manip into film, and read that you used kodack. I gotta say, I really like the film look. Almost polaroidish? Anyway the saturated look works for me because of the fact that you used film. It looks authentic.

Fortigurn wrote:
This was my first camera, a fully manual Pentax Spotmatic with only a very basic inbuilt light meter to guide me. I worked out all the shots by taking a good look at the scene and calculating the f-stops and speeds with a piece of paper (ignoring the light meter).

I still have this camera. It's about 30 years old now, and was maybe 20 years old when I took these.

For me, who just came in during the digital age, that's might impressive!!

dooda wrote:When I first looked I thought, that looks really filmy. Then I started looking for traces of digital manip into film, and read that you used kodack. I gotta say, I really like the film look. Almost polaroidish? Anyway the saturated look works for me because of the fact that you used film. It looks authentic.

Thanks. After about 12 years of photography, I still haven't moved over to digital. I love film, and I have six film cameras (the oldest being a 60 odd year old Yashica medium format). I can usually distinguish between digital and film images (anything up to 5MP is pretty easy, but past 6MP with professional cameras it does get more challenging), and prefer film.

Having said which, I do intend to move to digital this year (Nikon D50).

I really wish Kodak hadn't discontinued Royal Gold. It was a stunning film. I have yet to find a replacement.

Marvin wrote:

Fortigurn wrote:
This was my first camera, a fully manual Pentax Spotmatic with only a very basic inbuilt light meter to guide me. I worked out all the shots by taking a good look at the scene and calculating the f-stops and speeds with a piece of paper (ignoring the light meter).

I still have this camera. It's about 30 years old now, and was maybe 20 years old when I took these.

For me, who just came in during the digital age, that's might impressive!!

Thanks. I have to say I was moved by all the digital shots on this forum to post a few Old Skool shots, just to remind people what film can do, and how good some of the earlier equipment really was.

I spent about 8 years working with fully manual equipment like this before I even had my first automatic camera. I believe that did me a lot of good.