I was driving along a backroad and saw this scene from the corner of my eye. I was quicky struck by the graphical quality of the thin ribbons of golden light standing in the middle of the darkness, and the mistery of the place, where almost all trees were bare and looking dead. Light alone seemed to make this place alive.
I stopped dead and run to look for a decent composition making order of the chaos of the forest. I had just the time to load the 617 camera and take a couple of images. Then, the sun went down and the forest came back to the “reality”.
617 camera, rodenstock 180 5.6, velvia 50, f64, 40 seconds or so, image scanned in imacon scanner
Rafael Rojas secondary blog 
Great capture indeed. It seems that you really see 617 right now! But just a question: at f/64, does the picture suffer from diffraction?
Can you post a 100% crop of your picture to see the resolution of the lens, the quality of the scan and what 617 system is able to produce, perhaps?
You are totally right Alireza. Of course quality suffers due to diffraction when you stop down the lens. The only thing is that with a large format lens like the 180 5.6 you have a minimum focusing distance of 5 meters!, and in order to keep everything in the DOF from 4 meters (the closest trunk in the image) to around 30 meters (the background) i needed to focus in the hyperfocal distance of f64 to keep everything in the DOF. Of course, the overal sharpeness decreases, but that is much better than having parts of the image out of the DOF even if the rest of the image is sharper: the viewer can then compare sharp parts with fuzzy parts, and that disturbs and breaks the quality of the image. All in all, i try to use an aperture of around f22 or f32 in these large format lenses, but if you need DOF, there is no way to go around that. Photography is compromise, in the end you are dealing with physics, and as you know, there is no free lunch in the physical world ;-)
Anyway, even at f64 the quality is very very good. The tonal gradation of film is marvellous, and the rendering is always, by nature, less “crispy” than with digital. But for me, that is one of the appeals of film compared to digital…the results are in a way “softer” but they sing to the viewer in a way it is very difficult to achieve by using a sensor. Even the grain, compared to the digital noise, is much more graphical and pleasing…Anyway, time to blow up a print at 2 meters to see what this format can really give, i guess.
As far as your suggestion of posting a detail, that is very interesting. I will do it with a couple of images, taken with the schneider 90 and the rodenstock 180 for instance.
Thanks for reading and take care ;-)
Thanks for the answer Rafael. I am looking forward for reading the post.
But just another question. Don’t you miss the power of post-processing, when you work on film? You may say the film takes care of contrast and saturation, but how about the Dodge&Burn? Don’t you miss it?
Hi Alireza,
I never do doge and burning on my digital images. I am quite “lazy” when it comes to postprocessing, and i tend to use just lightroom for a minute or two at maximum. So, now, i maybe correct the levels for the scanned slides, and that is all. Velvia does all the rest! :)
I am not against photoshop, but when you see that new generations of photographers spend literally hours per image (words of Mark Adamus, whose work I admire), it drives me nuts. If you need to spend more than 2 minutes doing something in photoshop, either you did not do a good job by the tripod or the image you are giving away is a total computer product (nothing against that, but it should not be named photography in that case)…
Well, I agree with you somehow, that too much of post-processing is not an orthodox way of photography. But Dodge&Burn has been an old tool of trade for nature photographers, like Ansel Adams.
More than that, I believe that some old-school methods in photography are easily overtaken by digital ones. The easy example is the colored filters. The other one – though you may disagree – is the Graduated ND filters. You can easily do a much better job using multiple exposure and layers in Photoshop.
BTW, any news from Namibia trip?