Category Archives: Photographs

Anchorage 1978

Film, Photographs

A new life for an old image.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

I lived in Anchorage from November 1977 through October 1980, after which I moved to New York, new green card in hand.

The long summer days brought with them acidic colors and what better emulsion to do these justice than Kodachrome? I preferred Kodachrome 64 to the slower 25 variant, trading coarser grain for one and a half stops in speed gain. Even so ASA 64 rather pales beside what modern digital technology can deliver at a far higher quality level.

This image was taken on 4th Avenue which was ripped apart by a 9.2 earthquake in 1964, still the most powerful recorded in the US. Appropriately enough this occurred on Good Friday, for 4th Avenue was a den of iniquity back then, replete with dive bars and shady businesses.


Kodachrome yellow.

This image has been given new life when recently rescanned using the Nikon D800. The original Kodachrome slide is as good as new, no fading detectable. and was taken on my Leica M3 with the 50mm Summicron lens.

Putting the Boot in

Photographs

Sweet.

You can instantly recognize the two scummiest US professions, for they are the only ones still wearing suits – politicians and lawyers.

So it’s a pleasure to see one of the latter putting the boot into another rather than into one of their many abused clients.


On the Embarcadero, SF.

Panasonic G1, kit zoom.

For large prints from early Panny MFT originals I find there is too much chroma (mottling) noise in the printed image, but the new ‘Enhance’ option in the Develop module of LRc does a nice job of cleaning that up without significantly losing definition. For some reason it only works with RAW files, not with TIFF or JPG, so be sure to apply it to the right file format.