Today is National 3-D Day and celebrates the art, science, and history of stereoscopic 3-D imagery. This day was established in 2020 by 3-D Space, The Center For Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education. Since it’s also #wheelswednesday, you can see some of the 3D imagery that I created for my car photography website and blog, here and here. You can even see some 3D images on this blog in this post. Bring you own 3D glasses.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“why is a hot rod called a hot rod nobody. seems to know for sure but we do know that the term came about during World War II.”—anonymous
I was once asked to review the 50-megapixel Phase One 645DF medium format digital camera. It’s not every day I get to test a camera that costs as much as a new Challenger and like the Dodge there’s plenty of options from front to back that can affect the as-delivered price and the resultant file size.
The IIQ RAW files that are captured by the camera are large and vary in size from 35 to 45MB. The images that I made, including the featured photograph,were processed into smaller TIFF files using Phase One’s Capture One software.
How I made this photograph: To photograph this hot rod at a car show in Castle Rock, Colorado I attached a Schneider Kreuznach LS 80mm f/2.8 lens to the Phase One 645DF. This lens has six elements in five groups and traditionalists might think of it as a Super-Symmar XL but it does not bear this honored moniker. This image was shot using the 645DF’s Program mode producing an exposure of 1/250 sec at f/11 and ISO 200 while capyuring the most amazing detail I’ve seen in any automobile photograph I’ve made—so far anyway.
The conversion to monochrome from the original color file was made using Silver Efex with its default “Standard” preset along with my normal slider changes to minimize and noise/grain—not that there was any visible but, you know, habits…I typically move the Grain slider to minimize grain by making the Grain per Pixel the highest number (500) and then move the Soft/Hard slider to the extreme left to soften the grain as much as possible. (These are just my settings, you may increase the grain for a more gritty film look if that’s your style.) Next I clicked on the Orange filter that, after trying all of the others the plug-in offers, because it seemed to render the tones of the image’s original colors in a pleasant way.
Phase One’s P40+ back that was attached to the 645DF produced images of such startling clarity that I may never be able to look at automobile images captured with my digital SLRs or mirrorless cameras in quite the same way again. If you are interested in my take on shooting with medium format cameras, you might want to check out my video, The Pro’s and Con’s of Medium Format Film Cameras, on my YouTube channel.
A Note About a (Maybe) Contest: A photo lab back east who makes beautiful large prints from digital files once made me a large (16×20?) black and white print of this image. If I can find it—I think I know where it’s stored—I want to have a contest to give it away to one of my readers. First, I’m going to find the print, next I want to come up with an idea on how to build a contest around it. I’ll keep you posted.
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Copes of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects are available from Amazon for $11.46 with used copies starting at affordable prices—around seven bucks—right now. Pick up a copy now while they’re cheaper than your next “cup of joe” at Starbucks.