Dresden II

Here is another picture from the Dresden trip. It's taken with the Leica CM on Rollei IR film. I have worked with our film only once before, on our excursion to the Hakendover procession. Exposed at 100 iso and developed in the Scala process it delivers marvelous b&w chromes. I was impressed with thr results first time round and I now have a stock of this film in various formats (24x36, 120 and 4x5"). It's a real pleasure to look at these luminous and contrasty positives. I can't wait to experiment with larger sizes.

Development is done at Photostudio 13 in Stuttgart. Scanning of these chromes is odd. I am now working with the Epson V700 with which I do not have a lot of experience yet. But I noticed exactly the same phenomenon with the 3200. Looking at the chromes with the naked eye it is obvious that they are pin sharp. Scanning them results in a fairly blurred image. I am not used to doing heavy sharpening (mostly none at all) but here I have to. The settings for the unsharp mask look just ridiculous: a maximum amount of 500% with a radius of 2 pixels and a treshhold of 1 level. Subjecting it to that unsharp mask just makes the picture pop into focus. It is nicely sharp. And there is a very noticeable but very nice grain. The resulting look fits, I find, this kind of street photography very well. Otherwise the scanning is a piece of cake. There is hardly any tweaking to do. Exposures are usually spot on first time round.

I printed a couple of images with the new Epson 3800 at an A2 format and they look wonderful. Sharp but not artificially so. Nice grain. And the contrast and luminosity that is so very characteristic for this emulsion. Lovely.