This post is all about the Wash DC Cherry Blossoms. Because the cherry blossoms were about 2 weeks early this year (thank you again global warming), all of these pictures were actually taken the day before the official Cherry Blossom Festival began. The light that day was ok - flat with scattered clouds - but flat light can be good since film has less dynamic range than digital (and with film, if the colors aren't popping, you can always make great B&W's instead). So the conditions were favorable, and the cherry blossoms themselves were at peak bloom, and after two hours and two rolls of film, I was pretty sure that I'd bagged some great shots. Much to my chagrin, when I got my photos back from the lab, I'd only gotten the focus dead-on with a few of the pictures. Most of the shots are still sharp enough, but it kills me knowing that they're not quite as good as they could be. With split-prism manual focus, I've always found it much easier to be accurate when the subject has straight lines or high-contrast areas to use as focus points. It was tough to match the two half-circles when focusing on the cherry trees and blossoms, but it just means that I need more practice. And that's ok - I've got a whole year to work on it :)
Saving the best for first - this one is far and away my favorite of the afternoon. The colors, the detail, the texture... this is why I shoot a Hasselblad.
This last one was my worst goof. I was hoping to get a sliver of the grass in sharp focus by using the depth-of-focus scale on the lens, but I must have mis-read it, because I got nothing in focus. In a way, it still makes for a nice pic...
For the rest of the photos, the light was too flat for good colors, so I converted to B&W instead.
This is a weird one. I remember taking this shot and I'm 100% certain that I focused on the pagoda statue. What I think might have happened here is something called focus shift. If the camera is focused while set at one aperture, and then a different aperture is selected, the plane of focus can shift (some lenses do this, some don't). In my case, the plane of focus appears to have shifted from the statue to the tree, more or less. Next time I'll be sure to focus the camera after I've selected my aperture, and hopefully that'll keep this from happening again. What a pity though, it could have been such a nice shot!
Another of my favorite pics from the afternoon. There were tons of other photographers there, but I only saw one painter. Looked like a nice painting too :)
That's it for the cherry blossoms. Look for my next cherry blossom post in ~359 days, by which time I should be a little better at manual focus!
I like your blog. In this particular post you say that digital has a greater dynamic range than film. Actually, the opposite is true. In terms of latitude and dynamic range, film is superior all around.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback Steve. Print film certainly has more exposure latitude, that's for sure, but I'm not a believer when folks say that film has more dynamic range. In fact, I think that most people get these two terms mixed up, and are really talking about exposure latitude. That being said, I've never done an scientific comparison of the same image under the same lighting conditions, so I could be wrong.
DeleteI've always suspected that this idea of film having more range was probably true in the early days of digital, and it's something that film fanatics still cling to it in order to validate their choice of media. I myself shoot film just because I like the way it looks :)