Working with film negatives

I have been searching through my old film negatives and been scanning images that I took on my numerous wanderings around the city of Plymouth in the late 1980's, early 1990's.  This was a time where I would just grab my camera and photograph what caught my eye.  The image above is part of the railway bridge at Camel's Head - original image is in colour but this is a quadtone I made in Photoshop as part of my experimentation into B/W imaging for printing.  I really like the overall look to the image and using a red filter as part of the conversion to B/W in Photoshop helped to bring out the cloud formations in the sky although the contrast between the highlights and shadows are a little more extreme than they needed to be but then again, the lighting was pretty contrasty in the original too.

Edit: On further examining of techniques for converting colour images to B/W I will be returning to this photograph and making some changes to improve the contrast and overall look.  The photo posted here is good but it could be better.

Returning to film

I started out my photography "career" with an aging used 35mm camera and spent several enjoyable years teaching myself the art of photography. I also spent a lot of time just experimenting with composition and exposure - including reciprocity failure from long exposures in low light.

Skip forward 20 some years and I am entirely digital with a Nikon dslr setup....but I don't feel my photos are as good as my experimental period with film. Hence my recent purchase of a used Kiev IIa rangefinder camera (circa 1957). It is currently undergoing pre-sale servicing by the reseller and I am eager to get hands-on with it and shoot with film again. Hopefully it will allow me to capture the magic and creativity I feel is lacking in my
recent work.

I also intend to work primarily in black & white films, most likely from Ilford (FP4+, HP5+ and Pan-F+) as I really like printing on Ilford Gallerie inkjet paper for my digital work. To this end I have been examining ways to incorporate B/W film into my digital workflow and how to print "good" photos on my inkjet printer.... without the expense of additional software, inks or dedicated printers. I think I may have found my answer with using duotones within Photoshop. I will certainly be experimenting to see how well things print as compared to a normally B/W print on a colour inkjet with it's characteristic colour cast.

Home studio

As I go about cleaning out my garage at home I am planning out a small home
studio setup for portraits, still-life and product shots. Won't be anything
too fancy but will be nice to have a bit more space to move around.

Been having some hardware technical issues lately. My computer has been
giving some weird behaviour that is telling me it's time to rebuild with a
fresh install of the operating system. My camera has been having fits
periodically for a while but I am not really in a position right now to have
it checked/serviced by Nikon. My 20mm Nikkor is having a sticky diaphragm
again...and to top it all off my printer was having issues lastnight with it
not wanting to load paper correctly. Really frustrating to deal with all
this but hopefully none of it will entail any major expenditure.

Oh well, will just keep working around them all and keep taking photos.

Website link

After posting about my website I realized I forgot to include a link to my
website...d'oh!

www.ianmildon.com

Pretty simple and easy to remember address. Kept it fairly short as I don't
like having to type in long website names.

Updates

Finally moving forward with my blog and my website. I have got rid of the
"coming soon" placeholder page and have at least got my name and links to my
blog and Twitter out there. I also have a uniform look to both my blog and
website to hopefully create a clean look and ease of reading.

With a little more work I will get more samples of my photography on both
sites and create a larger online presence for myself and my work.