Yosemite Valley: A Photo Essay
Technical Notes
Equipment
Two cameras were used during this trip: a ten-year-old Nikon FG for
black-and-white work and an eleven-year-old Sears KSX Super (SLR
that takes Pentax lenses) for color and infra-red work.
Lenses were a Tamron 28-70mm f/3.5 zoom and a Tamron 70-200mm f/4.0 zoom.
Zone system meter readings for black-and-white work were taken using
a grey card,
Sekonic hand meter,
and a 40-year-old spot meter.
A handful of filters
(#29 red, polarizer,
0.6 ND,
#8 yellow,
#9 yellow,
#58 green,
#21 orange),
cable releases,
Slik U6000 tripod,
and notebooks rounded out the kit.
Film
My primary films were:
- Fuji NPS 160 at rated speed (color)
- Kodak T/Max 400 at rated speed (black-and-white)
- Kodak High-speed Infra-red at ISO 400 (infrared)
In addition,
some pictures were taken with Fuji Reala 100 at rated speed (color) and
Kodak Tri-X 400 at rated speed (black-and-white).
Processing and Printing
Fujicolor processing was used for all color work;
images were scanned from 4x6 inch prints.
Black and white film was processed with T/Max developer 4:1 at 68F for seven
minutes.
Infra-red film was processed with D-76 1:1 at 68F for ten minutes.
Oriental Seagull VC+ fiber and Kodak Polymax Fine Art fiber papers were used
for all black-and-white and infra-red prints.
All black-and-white images were printed at contrast grades 1 and 2;
all infra-red images were printed at contrast grade 3.
Final dimentions of prints were 6x8 inches or 6x9 inches.
Digital Production
Prints were scanned using a UMAX bed scanner,
onto a 386 running Adobe Photoshop 2.5.
All monochrome images were scanned using a gamma set at 1.8,
and later corrected to 2.2;
all color images had their balances calculated automatically,
and were later corrected to a gamma of 2.2.
Aside from rescaling and some minor spotting,
no modifications to the images were made.
Images were saved as TIFF files,
then converted and scaled using NetPBM and JPEG utilities.