Fur Brigade Trail No. 111

From the Fur Brigade Trail, Peachland, British Columbia, Canada, June 2019.

Okanagan Lake No.3

Okanagan Lake, Peachland, British Columbia, Canada, June 2019.

Dinosaur Photographer

Lake Louise, (No.337) Banff National Park Alberta, Canada, September 2012. Copyright © Gary Nylander. Scanned from 4 x 5 negative. Ebony RW45 view camera, 120mm lens, T-Max 400 film. 


I was once called a dinosaur while photographing with my 4 x 5 view camera at a popular lake in Banff National Park several years ago. Another photographer saw me with my antique looking setup and called out to me "Hey dinosaur!" the comment was rather amusing and I felt flattered that I was "old school". After a friendly chat with him, he had told me that he too had been a large format camera user but had recently purchased a Nikon D800 digital camera (which had just come out on the market at the time). He was so impressed with the Nikon digital image quality that he stopped using his 4 x 5 view camera. When this photographer was telling me about how great his D800 camera was in comparison to his view camera and I believed what he was telling me.

To back up a bit, I started in the film photography days in the mid-1970s. By 1985 I was seriously into using a 4 x 5 view camera. Back then there was a reasonable justification for using such a big and bulky camera —it produced superior image quality retaining great detail while making large prints. It was the gold standard. When showing larger size prints the difference was obvious. Over the next three decades, I continued to use my view camera because that's the camera I owned and was comfortable using.

On my time off from my newspaper job at the Kelowna Daily Courier I shot a variety of subjects, mostly landscapes with the 4 x 5 view camera and sometimes even my 8 x 10 view camera. At the newspaper from 2001 to 2018 I shot all digital and loved it. From time to time I would run comparisons with my view camera and digital cameras and felt that the view camera was "The" camera to use for my black and white photography. I once did a side by side print comparison test in 2009 when a friend purchased a Nikon D3x with a 24-megapixel sensor, at think at the time it was $7000 (body only). The D3x was not a camera that the paper would want to buy and not something I could afford. The results of the print test were that the Nikon D3x was closer than I thought in terms of capturing fine detail, looking at a 12 x 18-inch print it was hard to tell which print was made with which camera, looking at larger prints the view camera started to show better detail.

When I first started using digital cameras in the fall of 2001 during my years as a staff photographer at the newspaper, my camera they issued to me at the time was a Nikon D1H which had a 2.7-megapixel sensor, I didn't think a tiny senor like that was much of a match for the much bigger size of  4 x 5 sheet film. There were many surprises and impressions along the way. The next year after having gone digital at the newspaper,  I made a thrilling shot of an Osprey feeding it's young. The photo was very popular among Courier readers and many prints were sold. One of the larger sized prints was 16 x 20 inches that ended up in the Harvard Art Museums. The print had to be of the very highest quality possible. I had a local photography shop print it on their then-new Epson 7600 with Sommerset velvet paper. That particular print did turn out to be very impressive, considering that the image of the birds had to be cropped to help fill the frame and that was all from a 2.7-megapixel sensor!

Since I left the newspaper business at the end of 2017, I continue to pursue my art photography and I also shoot some commercial freelance work. I needed some better digital camera gear for the commercial side of my work so I ended up choosing the best I could afford which was the Nikon D850, as I already had some F mount lenses. I have to say that the D850 with its 45 megapixels sensor is very impressive. I still find it amazing when looking at digital images from this camera, zeroed in at 100% with an abundance of fine detail is available. I keep thinking I'm looking at one of my scanned 4 x 5 negatives but without the grain.

I  also like to shoot with my 4 x 5 view camera and other film cameras ( 35mm, 120 even 8 x 10), although not I'm not quite ready to jettison the view camera entirely. However, I do wonder how I'm going to make use of this particular camera that uses sheet film which is getting more and more expensive as time goes on. Gone are the days when Kodak Tri-X 4 x 5 sheet film was 50 cents a sheet, one of my all-time favourite black and white films.

Now I am thinking of finding new ways to use my film cameras that I had not thought of the past.  The digital camera will also be of interest where I was once limited to shooting a few sheets of film on a hiking excursion I will now have more opportunities to photograph due to the fact that I would sometimes be out of sheet film and passing by interesting photo possibilities having used up my 18 sheets of film for the day.

It will be interesting to see how the future unfolds with my photography and what creative potential opportunities lie ahead.

FYI: Here is my blog post 4 x 5 view camera = Nikon D850

New Light Through Old Lenses

Nikon D850 with the rapid rectilinear lens about 150mm ƒ4 made by Bausch and Lomb Optical Company.

I decided to play the mad photographic scientist and make some Frankenstein like adapters to try out some old brass camera lenses that I had in my collection. I'm certainly not the first time a photographer to stick an old brass lens on a modern-day digital camera but I thought it would be fun to try. A hundred years ago many camera lenses were made of brass and had no optical coatings on the glass elements. I had 2 old lenses I wanted to try out that I thought might work.

The first lens is a rapid rectilinear lens about 150mm ƒ4 made by Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, it's set in a Kodak automatic shutter. The lens was attached to a No. 3 Cartridge Kodak Camera that was manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company from 1900 to 1907. I acquired this camera along with a number of other old cameras about 5 years ago.

The second lens I had is an old Beck Symmetrical lens about 250mm ƒ8 that I have owned for about 40 years or more, it has no shutter and the aperture blades are long gone. I made some drop-in waterhouse stops. The Beck lens manufacturing company has been around since the 1850s They were a British optical manufacturing company based in London UK and produced a wide range of optical products: microscopes, telescopes, eye test glasses for opticians (optometer lenses), other optical equipment, including camera lenses and cameras.

Since I had no way to focus the lenses I used a close-up focusing bellows attachment. I also needed some kind of adapter to mount the lenses on to the bellows which was made for a Nikon camera. I didn't want to spend a lot of money as I was not too sure how it might work, so found some cheap stuff on Amazon. I was able to screw the Beck lens right into the M42 to Nikon adapter which I thought was pretty amazing. For the Bausch and Lomb lens I had to do a bit more figuring out as the lens flange is much smaller, luckily I had some small screws and I was able to drill some holes in the lens adapter using parts of the old Kodak camera, in the end, it ended up holding the lens in place.

I only put this together recently and have included a couple "test" photos. I will try and photograph some other subjects to see what use I can practically make from them. So far they look not too bad for lenses about to hit the 120-year-old mark. Of course quite soft at wide-open apertures they do seem to improve in sharpness stopped down with a smaller aperture. Perhaps the interesting way to use them is to use them wide open or stopped down just a little to try and capture a softer look to the photograph.

There you have it old meets new and is new once again.

Yellow daisies (No. 254) Nikon D850 on tripod with the rapid rectilinear lens, stopped down to about ƒ16, 1/2 second. 


 

Yellow daisies (No. 255) Nikon D850 on tripod with the rapid rectilinear lens, wide open at ƒ4, 1/15th second. 


  Nikon D850 with the Beck Symmetrical lens about 250mm ƒ8. 


  Yellow daisies (No. 253) Nikon D850 on tripod with the Beck Symmetrical lens, wide open at ƒ8, 1/20th second.

Nikon D850 = 4 x 5 view camera

Ten years ago in April of 2009, I wrote a blog piece about the image comparison between the then-new Nikon D3X and my Tachihara 4 x 5 view camera.

Since then a lot has changed, at the time I didn't own the 24 megapixel Nikon D3X, a friend owned one. Recently I bought a 45 megapixel Nikon D850 digital camera. I still have a 4 x 5 view camera, not the Tachihara now an Ebony RW45, I still have a 120mm Schneider lens after the previous one is now in pieces after trying to do a self-repair (another story). In 2009 I was working as a photographer in the newspaper business, today I have parted ways and I am doing some non-newspaper freelance work including work for Outland Design Architecture. I needed a camera that was a cut above what would have been sufficient for newspaper work. I opted for the D850 because I already had a number of Nikon lenses and besides I have shot Nikon since the beginning of my photography career 43 years ago.

I'm extremely impressed with the D850 camera, the images are beyond my expectations. I have been a long time film user and have enjoyed using various formats from 35mm to 8 x 10. I chose the view camera mainly because of the superior image quality from the big negatives. When I worked in the newspaper business the paper provided my digital equipment so I saw no need to buy a lot of expensive digital camera gear when only had so much time to shoot on my own, on my days off and holidays, I enjoyed using my film cameras, it seemed like a good balance.

I am giving it some serious thought as to it to produce my artwork. Being of a curious nature I wondered if I were to shoot a similar scene with both my film cameras and the new D850 what would they look like? The short answer is that I see no real difference in terms of image quality from images made with the digital D850 and my 4 x 5 view camera. It's quite surprising just how much detail that the D850 is capable of capturing all things considered given that the Nikon's digital image sensor is the same size of a piece of 35mm film at 24mm x 36mm.

Along for the ride I threw in my 65-year-old Rolleiflex with a 75mm fixed lens and my 50-year-old Leica M4 fitted with a 35mm Summilux lens of similar vintage. On the Nikon, I used the newest 35mm ƒ1.8 G lens. I know that these kinds of tests can be difficult to decipher and are only considered a guideline in terms of real day to day image quality. There are so many variables and these comparison tests can get bogged down in "what if I used this film or this lens."

For cameras and film materials, I used what items I had on hand, my collection of film cameras and film I already had and was using on a regular basis. In the roll film cameras I used some Kodak T-Max 400 rated at 200 ISO along with some Kodak Ektar ISO 100 and for the 4 x 5 view camera I had some outdated T-Max 100 sheet film but still very useable. I processed the film myself using Kodak HC-110 Developer. The older T-Max 100 needed longer developing time due to it being outdated (1997). As a matter of interest I "scanned" the film images with the Nikon D850 and a 60mm Nikkor macro lens set up on a copy stand with an LED light source, this is something I have been doing for a while now and it works very well. The digitally copied negatives look every bit as good as what I could get out of my flatbed scanner and better especially with 35mm film.

Perhaps it will make more practical sense to carry the digital Nikon, especially on longer hikes. With my 4 x 5 set up I generally carried a tripod, three lenses, 120mm, 180mm, and 270mm plus up to nine film holders. That can add up to a fair amount of weight including food, and water. My digital outfit in which I still take a tripod consists of three lenses, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm which all fits into a lighter and smaller sized backpack, I figure about 8 pounds in weight savings. It will be interesting to see what kind of art I can create with this new camera, there might even be some colour images too.