By way of example:

Apologies for the hard water marks; Hamburg water seems to have enough calcium to deposit teeth on an roll of film.

High drama, you have to admit! But look at the blown out sky at the top of the frame. I’m willing to live with a few blown pixels in an over exposed shot that i’m trying to save, but that’s just too much. My recollection of that day, taking the shot, and my thought process at the time, was nothing like the above. Pretty sure the sky was much flatter, and that the exposure was set not to blow out the sky (meaning it was metered a little way above the horizon, and the difference between the shore and sky was only a couple of stops). Looking at the negative on a lightbox with loupe, it’s obvious that there is a bunch of detail there, and the grain is pretty fine.

Obviously i don’t know what i’m doing with the scanning software.

This is something of a relief. Since moving pretty much everything has changed in my process (the film, developer, water, scanner) but at least being able to trust that the negative looks alright gives me a starting point. My old cheapo Canon scanner, with its horrendously inflexible software had never given me these problems… how could SilverFast be doing so much worse?

Being a simple sort, my initial attempts to improve the situation involved turning a lot of things up: DPI, bit rate, etc. End result: better quality scans of the same mess. Not encouraging.

Then found the ‘Tolerance’ slider, describing itself as ‘set orange mask detection tolerance’, which when pushed over to the left (on the above image) reduced the contrast, gave me back my highlights and shadow detail. Victory? Well, not really, no. The same solution, or variations of it – messing with the tolerance at various settings, wasn’t always guaranteed to change things. Sometimes it didn’t change anything…

Clicking around some more revealed the ‘Expert’ button (which i’d actually clicked on thinking it was a tutorial, the icon is mortar board. An obvious sign of desperation, RTFM…) One of the tabs behind the expert button, labelled ‘Expansion’, contained RGB histograms. Finally something useful.

It seems that by default SilverFast sets up these histograms for maximum contrast, at the expense of dynamic range. That seems like an odd choice. You think that they’d focus on getting as close as possible to giving you all the information in the negative, but maybe this way works best for colour negative film. The results there are certainly better, as are the results scanning reversal.

Anyway, after some mucking about with the histograms, which pretty much comes down to not clipping the shoulders off both ends of the curves, it possible to get a reasonably flat image which can have contrast added back to it in Lightroom.

Which for a start is much closer to the reality of the scene, and then much closer to the atmosphere that i’d hoped to create.

That said, what a colossal PITA to have to be dragging sliders around on histograms just to get a reasonable b&w scan! One of the problems with being a software engineer is that you often find yourself thinking, maybe i should file a bug to encourage them to fix it… In reality it’s no doubt a difficult problem to balance all the parameters and come up with reasonable defaults for all scenarios. Given that they already include presets for different flavours of film, it doesn’t seem like it would hard to include a ‘maximise range’ preset.

Long and short: it’s possible to get decent / good scans of b&w negatives out of SilverFast 8, but its more involved than it (perhaps) ought to be.

“There’s a crisis of western capitalism, which has gone geriatric. The dynamic capitalism, with its energy, innovation and sheer greed for growth has moved east.”

– Meghnad Desai, emeritus professor LSE

is the good news, it’s easy to get a little despondent. Even my terminally optimistic friends (…) seem to think that we need to bounce off the bottom… admittedly before then resuming our glorious ascent toward becoming beings of light.

It’s a shame Tainter is such a dull read.

“The advantage of the Anglo-Saxon model is clear. It encourages innovation, it is versatile, and it promotes individual freedom,” says Mr Yao. “But its disadvantages are equally clear. It is very fluid, it is cruel to employees, and it brings large destructive forces when economic downturns come.” He favours a Nordic system of high taxes, relative equality and less boom and bust. But in Asia, only Japan and South Korea come anywhere close to that model.

Another reason to watch my current favorite TED talk:

China has built a machine to produce fast growth in a poor country. But there is no guarantee its system will be able to match western living standards without a radical overhaul.

There is very little question in my mind that the planet lacks the resources to support the chinese population at current western standards of living. The uncomfortable truth is that it won’t just be them rising, it’ll be us sinking to meet them somewhere in the middle. Or war.

All this, and more, can be found in the FTs ‘Capitalism in crisis’ series. Which to be honest is rather disappointing, amounting to a lot of hand-wringing, and not really daring to think anything radical. Years from now people will still be putting down challenges to western democracy and capitalism with the same tired old Churchill quote…

Instructions for use.

Preferably a Sunday afternoon. Take the Number 62 boat to Neumühlen, or walk down from Altona to the river. Keep heading out of town on Övelgönne, until you find a route down onto the beach. You should have found Strandperle. Meet, or turn up with, friends. Order Glühwein, with or without shots of rum. Now sit and watch the tide lap up onto the terrace, as the sun sinks lower and lower in the sky. Feel the ♥.

You are now enjoying Hamburg. Congratulations!

(of Turtle, Heron, and Koi.)

Periodically it feels like it’s enough. You can follow your muse, but how far? Sometimes it feels i’m dragging that bitch around like a corpse…

Maybe it’ll end up being a dead-end, but i’m oddly compelled to ignore the doubts and keep trying. By no means will it be the only think that i’m shooting, but it might always be in the back of mind for when i see interesting architecture.

Thanks Tom. That was great!

The recipe is probably a closely guarded secret… so it’ll have to wait until it has evolved.

Des Esseintes stages a funeral for his late virility:

In the dining room, hung in black & opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with basalt & filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses & pines, the dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets & scabiouses, lit by a candelabra from which green flames blazed, & by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concelaed orchestra, nude negresses, wearing slippers & stocking of silver cloth with patterns of tears, served the guests.

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup & eaten Russion rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice & blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries & black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out of dark glasses, wines from Limagnes, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas & Porto, & after the coffee & walnut brandy had partaken of kvas & porter & stout.

Huysmans, what a glorious piece of Victoriana…

There he sits, outside 東大寺, scaring anyone daft enough to get close…

Anyway, now i have a scanner i’ve been looking at some of the negatives.

Here’s a little chunk of 1-to-1 grain from the middle (Delta 400 Pro pushed to 1600 using Ilfotec DD-X at 20C):

Lovely and soft! I’m really rather happy. The only issue is that Ilford need to work on their quality control / consistency. They aren’t great at getting the film rolled, which seems to result in the film markings turning up really close to the exposed frame.