I guess my current winter project participates in the current theme
among us about those we have loved and lost in recent days and years.
After my dad passed in 2004, my mother rattled around her Victorian
home for a year and then sold it and moved across the road from us.
It's great having her close by. She's enjoying little things like
picking up my son from school and going to church with us almost every
Sunday.
Like most people she didn't really completely clean up down to
essentials before her move, so she's continued to go through
keepsakes. She occasionally brings things over that might interest
me, rather than just pitch them, and they usually do. Certainly, her
hand-colored wedding photo from 1944 was one of those. It's a photo
of the entire wedding party, so the people are smallish, and since
most are relatives I would have to say that they did the least well at
"coloring" my mother, since they made her eyes brown rather than blue
(sort of opposite of the Crystal Gayle song!).
The photo is in lousy shape. It was originally mounted without
matting right up against glass. The glass was broken at some point,
which did some damage, but probably moisture damage was already there
before that point. There are patches of gloss and patches that are
dull here and there all over the surface. The original had a kind of
matte finish which probably didn't have much hardener in it, so it
sort of melted into the glass here and there and became glossy in
patches.
It appears to me that the original negative was printed and then
enlarged to 11x14. It was then either sepia toned or given some other
kind of warm brown tone. This then was hand-colored. My mother
remembers that there used to be girls at the photography studio whose
only job was hand-coloring. The faces are actually very soft. I
don't think this was intentional. The camera lens, or more likely the
enlarger lens, was just so-so. Very soft at the corners, but not so
great even in the center.
I tried scanning the original on a flatbed. I didn't have much hope
that the mottled finish would be improved on scanning, and it wasn't.
I decided to set up my Bogen as a copy stand and shoot it with the
E-330. Initially I used the Z 50/3.5 with T28 twin flashes. The
problem with that setup is that the 50 on the E-330 just requires too
much working distance for a photo of that size. The flashes have
power enough but the distance negates their "cross-cancelling"
capabilites. That combination did a worse job than the flatbed
scanner.
I decided to try the T10 ring flash and cross-polarizer. Wow, what a
fantastic combination for this purpose! And O the rapture of Live
View B! Even through the deep darkness of the cross-polarizer a
usable image emerges in the LCD with which to refine focus. Yes,
Roger Askey, it is grainy, as the camera struggles to bring the light
level up to "normal." But compared to trying to focus through the
viewfinder? Pish! The dang thing's a miracle.
Ultimately, I didn't like the working distance of the Z 50/3.5 with
the T10/cr-pol combo. I wanted to shoot it at ISO 100 (although 200
was indistinguishable, really) and wanted to stop down a bit further
than f5.6. So I tried the Z 35/2.8. Not bad, but still not quite as
close as I wanted to be in order to improve the light falloff problem.
So I decided to give the Z 24/2.8 a try. Ultimately, this allowed me
to shoot at f8 and ISO 100 with the T10/cr-pol. The result is clearly
not quite flat-field corrected, but I ended up cropping the telltale
signs of this anyway.
I spent most of the day yesterday working with the digital copy,
fixing stains here and there and doing a lot of touching up with the
clone and healing tools. But this was all mainly easy stuff. I was
even able to use the PS highlight/shadow tool to open the background a
bit. I had to back off from using it as much as I might have wished
because it appeared to introduce some coloration into the white suits,
etc., something that bears watching when using this tool, I guess.
I have not been a big fan of the T10 for general photography, but it's
really good for copy work. With copy work there is also always a
tendency to build up contrast a bit. The T10 also helps with that
problem.
My next project is to see whether the T10/cr-pol combo can eliminate
the pebble finish on some of those portrait papers. I'm betting it
can.
Joel W.
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