Scanning negative film can be immensely tedious. If you wish to attempt it yourself and don’t have access to a means of applying accurate colour profiles, then presented in this post is a summary of my Photoshop workflow to achieve desirable (by my current standards) results.
Using your scanning software (I use Vuescan), scan the negative as you would a positive using completely neutral colour and contrast settings. Save as a 16 bit/channel TIFF image. I’ve often found Vuescan’s film profiles to be horrible – particularly for the recent batch of medium format Kodak Ektar I’ve been trying – so I stay away from them.
In Photoshop, invert the image. Note the blue mask from the orange base of the film – this is different for every film hence the need for profiles.
Set the black point by using a curves layer. In the pop-up box change the display to show clipping and using the black dropper, keep redefining the black point until there is only a very small amount of clipping.
Set middle grey using a levels layer. In tandem, adjust the input levels slider for white (while checking the histogram for clipping) and define middle grey with the dropper. I’ve used an arrow to point to my selection.
Adjust contrast to taste with another curves layer.
With a small rotation and removal of dust, this is the final result. Note that I’ve stayed away from colour balance layers – they ask for trouble.
Feedback is welcomed. If you scan your own film and use this, or a variant of this routine, I’d be interested to hear about it.
I spent a bit of time wandering the arkose platforms beyond Elliot River to find a suitable way to portray the unique weathering patterns of the greywacke. The scene I chose took my fancy because of its similarities to a well strung spider’s web which has somehow managed to catch periwinkles. I splashed a few handfuls of water over the web to darken it and fill the cellular pools.
The greywacke of the Otway coast is a relatively unstable rock – physically because it is poorly sorted, and chemically because of unweathered elements. It is therefore not surprising that under the constant splash it develops honeycomb weathering rapidly. The honeycomb develops chiefly in the splash zone. Because the swell produces sizeable waves on most days of the year, the splash is a constant feature of the environment. Because the sea is microtidal, the splash is concentrated in a relatively narrow band. Source
Eucalyptus regnans (Mountain Ash) is a species of eucalypt native to southeastern Australia. Reaching heights in excess of 90 m, it is recognised as the tallest of all flowering plants. It is currently surpassed in height by only two species of conifer, Sequoia sempervirens (Coast Redwood) and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas-fir), which can be found in the temperate forests along the northwestern coast of North America.
In physical appearance, a mature forest of mountain ash is an imposing sight, with giant straight trunks, creamy-white to pale green or grey, rising 30–60 m above a wet sclerophyll or rainforest understorey. The tree has a 5–10 m stocking of fibrous brown bark at its often buttressed base; then the smooth cream to light grey gum-type bark above extends to the upper branches. Sometimes the first branches will not appear for 60 m up the trunk, and they are often draped with long peeled strips of annually shed bark. Because the leaves hang vertically, the tree crown may appear unduly small in proportion to the size of the trunk, especially to a viewer directly below the crown. Source
In Out of Control: the tragedy of Tasmania’s forests (2007), Richard Flanagan claims that over 85% of Tasmania’s old-growth regnans forests are gone, and it is estimated that fewer than 13,000 hectares of these extraordinary trees remain in their old-growth form. In Tasmania’s Styx Valley, the world’s last (and tallest) great unprotected stands of old-growth Eucalyptus regnans are being reduced to piles of smouldering ash.
While many species of eucalyptus recover from severe bushfires through epicormic growth mechanisms, stands of E. regnans are highly susceptible to destruction by intense crown fire because of their dependence on total regrowth from seed. Fortunately, the natural habitat of E. regnans is the areas of Australia with the highest and most reliable rainfall, which are inherently less prone to catastrophic fires than other forested areas. All of Victoria’s 15 tallest trees grow in designated water catchments enclosed within the Wallaby Creek headwaters of Kinglake National Park and the O’Shannassy region of the Yarra Ranges National Park, which are completely protected from logging (but not from bushfire). Some publicly accessible protected tall stands can be found in the Otway Ranges (top – Turtons Track), Dandenong Ranges (centre – Olinda Falls), and the Strzelecki Ranges (bottom – Mt Worth).
Alderman Howard Hitchcock, the man who became president of the Great Ocean Road Trust in 1918, never got to drive the full length of the iconic coastal route he set out to construct. Proclaiming it better for ocean, mountain, river and fern gully scenery than the Côte d’Azur of France, California State Route 1 of the U.S.A and Bulli Pass of New South Wales, Hitchcock died of heart disease (1932) before his Great Ocean Road was completed, having contributed £3000 of his own money to its appeal. Although the intent was primarily a source of work for returned serviceman of the Great War, it is as much a permanent memorial to mates who died whilst fighting for their country.
Displayed here is a panoramic photograph of a stretch of snaking road cut into the mountains between Lorne and Apollo Bay, the last section to be built because of the difficulty it posed to picks, shovels and horse-drawn carts.
