Alpental

As I’ve mentioned on this blog, and to some of you privately, I’ve recently been shooting with a 35mm. SLR. The first few rolls of film I ran through it were negative film, the kind of film which produces “negatives” (i.e. the more light a region receives, the darker it becomes). This is the dominant sort of film in use. I’ve switched over to using a different kind of film, so-called “color reversal” or “slide” or “positive” film. This film produces a positive image when exposed. It’s vastly less popular than negative (“print”) fim for several very good reasons.

Positive film is very difficult to expose correctly- slightly too much light and a frame will be solid white, slightly too little and it will come out solid black. Negative film, on the other hand, can be over-exposed or under-exposed by significant amounts and still come out well enough.

Positive film cannot be easily used to produce prints in a darkroom, while negative film is perfect for enlarging.

Positive film suffers from reciprocity failure much more than negative film. Ideally, the exposure on a piece of film should depend only on the total amount of light received, not on the rate at which light impinged on the film. For example, if I increase the ratio between the focal length of a lens and the diameter of the aperture by sqrt (2), then at a given focal length, the diaphragm area is half as great (since it depends on the square of the ratio between focal length and aperture diameter) and so half as much light will come through per unit time. All I need to do, theoretically, is to double the exposure time to keep the exposure constant. With negative film, this usually works. With positive film (especially the kind I am using), the exposure depends on the total amount of light that hits the film AND the rate at which the light hits the film (!). Worse still, these dependencies vary according to the type of light that is illuminating the scene, the color of the subject, and the shutter speed (!).

Finally, positive film itself costs much more than negative film, but the real difference in cost arises in the processing step: positive film is ruinously expensive to have processed, and not many labs will do it.

Regardless of these issues, I am starting to prefer positive film to negative, insofar as it gives better resolution and more accurate color reproduction. I’ve been shooting in downtown Palo Alto. The images below are from my first roll of positive film, a roll of Fuji Velvia ISO=100. Most were shot through a Vivitar Series 1 lens at a focal length between 70mm. and 210mm.

The Series 1 is a strange lens. Shot wide-open at 70mm., it is blazingly fast (F/2.8). Shot wide-open at 210mm., it is creepingly slow (F/12). Very few zoom lenses show such a change in the [focal length] : [maximum aperture diameter] ratio. Most zoom lenses are faster at the short end than at the long, but a difference this large is unheard of, even in zoom lenses which offer a much wider range of focal lengths. The Series 1 is a 3X zoom lens, but its speed varies much more than a typical 10X zoom lens. To change the focal length of the Series 1, you push and pull the lens barrel, rather than rotate it- this is unlike virtually all other zoom lenses. In the Series 1, you rotate the barrel counterclockwise to focus at greater distance, which is opposite the behavior of virtually all other lenses, zoom or otherwise. The Series 1 also has a macro function; it can focus on very close objects, but only when the focal length is set to the full 210mm. Virtually all other lenses have a longer minimum focal distance at longer focal lengths; the Series 1 behaves opposite this. Such behavior is baffling; it is as if the engineers thought “hmm, photographers will probably want to zoom in on nearby objects and zoom out on distant objects”. Finally, if you push the lens to 210mm. and set the focal point close, you cannot un-zoom (shorten the focal length) until you turn the focus further away, due to some kind of locking mechanism in the lens itself. Despite these bizarre characteristics, the optics are decent. Focusing at F/12 is a challenge; you really need California sunshine for that.

Below are some street shots from California Avenue.

Click an image to view it larger.

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"Woman With Electric Hair And Phone"

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"Man With One Visible Earring"

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"I Have Two Cups Of Coffee"

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"I Have A Book And An Orange"

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"I Like To Hang Out At Antonio's"

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"I Have Only A Single Cup Of Coffee But I Do Have A Chair"

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"Man With Strange Red Chevrons On His Shirt"

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"Woman With Silver Hair Touching Her Eye"

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"Wistful Bro At Coffee Shoppe"

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"Woman Smoking Cigarette In Red And Blue"

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"Woman With Blue Mechanical Pencil"

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I have two rolls from Seattle (one black-and-white negative, one color positive) which I am having developed at this time. I plan to be around long enough for them to be finished, but beyond that, I want to travel to wherever there is the most potential and the least positive feedback, the "land of opportunity" if you will.