PhotoIndica – Telling tales with pixels and grain

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After a long hiatus I took my trusted Hasselblad 500C/M camera out with a 60mm Distagon lens for a spin. After playing around with B&W film I decided to use color for a change. The choice was appropriate given that it was Fall and leaves were turning colors everywhere. I usually end up going to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is right in my backyard, every time I get a shutter itch. It rained overnight and the ground was soggy and there were other photographers shooting Fall portraits of their clients. For a rather gloomy day many of them weren’t using a flash or off-camera lighting for some reason – may be digital cameras have gotten better at high ISOs. For the above photograph I used the “Hyperfocal” distance technique. You can read about it here. In the past I used to focus at infinity and use the smallest possible (Highest Aperture Number) aperture opening thinking that it was all I need for good landscapes. I was so wrong. My earlier landscapes usually ended up with blurry foreground. You can see that the above photo does not suffer from that problem. It is sharp foreground to background and I couldn’t be happier. I also rated the Fuji NPC 160 film at ISO 100 instead of ISO160 to increase saturation and capture shadow detail. I will post rest of the photos from the series over the next few days.