A break from the Italian photos. I had a few film rolls from the winterkicking around and I finally had them developed. I got out the scannerand decided to simply scan the full rolls at high resolution. It takesabout an hour per roll, feeding the negatives on strip of four at a timethrough the Minolta Scan Dual III. I could speed up the process with abetter scanner like the Nikon CoolScan 5000 and ensuring that thenegatives are cut into strips of 6 to fill the negative carrier on theScan Dual.Why? I love the look of the Leica and, here, Tri-X. I like shooting withthe rangefinder, using the exposure lessons I’ve learned with the D80 tocapture images with the simpler center weighted meter in the M6.With the camera loaded with black and white film, it takes a while tothink more graphically knowing contrast will come from shading only, notcolors. Having shot so many color images over the past 6 months andpushed the saturation and contrast in them, my eye tends to be attractedto color contrast. I believe that I can use black and white to becomemore sensitive to shape in compositions, filtering out the colordistractions.Why film at all? I’ve decided that the M8 is just a bit version 1.0 forme to sink US$5000 into it. That’s a lot of film and developing. I havethe Nikon for digital work, so I’ll keep the M6 for these tonalexperiments and perhaps on occasion as a compact travel kit, shootingcolor slide film.
