BGWG #12: Kodak Tri-X 35mm & 20-Year Tawny Port

well merry christmas boys and girls and to all my friends in portugal feliz natal [Music] hello and welcome to another installment of behind the glass with a glass i'm nick carver and are you feeling the holiday cheer i know i am are you also feeling the crippling anxiety of time slipping through your fingers like grains of sand in an hourglass i'm feeling that one too um well let's not talk about that let's talk about photography and find spirits um so today i want to talk about 35 millimeter i actually have some new pictures to share with you a shot on 35 millimeter believe it or not and i also want to tell you about a project i did recently for a brewery where i went out and did some 6x17 and 4x5 to make some some artwork for them but before we get into all that let me tell you what i'm sipping here so this is a taylor fladgate 20-year tawny port now ports are a type of wine they are a fortified wine so it's made from grapes but a fortified wine means that they added distilled spirits to it distilled liquor and also from grapes in this case and uh that raises the alcohol content quite a bit this has an alcohol content of uh 20 by volume so uh it's hefty uh it'll hit you hard if you drink a lot of it now ports named after portugal of course are typically associated with dessert wines something you would have after a delicious feast and this would cap off the night and i do love it for that but it's also good just to sip whenever you want something you know real yummy that packs a punch now when it comes to ports there are two main varieties you'll come across there's ruby ports and tawny ports this being a tawny port now the main difference between them is uh how they're stored and that ends up resulting in a change in color so a ruby port uh is stored in concrete and stainless or stainless steel barrels um now concrete or stainless steel barrels don't allow any oxygen to come in they're air tight doesn't allow any evaporation and you end up with a very uh you know reddish ruby colored port at the end of it tawny ports on the other hand um they are stored in wood barrels now in wood barrels a couple things happen first off because they're not airtight air can get in and that oxidizes the wine a bit which changes the taste changes the flavor but also some evaporation can occur over time and that results in a little bit more syrupy consistency so these things are a little bit heavy they're heavier than a standard wine now ports are interesting because uh they became real popular in england um in fact there was a treaty in 1703 um called the methuen treaty methuen treaty something like that which made it so they couldn't really import wines from france i believe and so port was a much easier thing to get with much lower import tax and so they became quite popular that from what i understand is why so many of the ports uh bear very english names taylor fladgate um seems very british to me so uh all the importers at the time were english bringing it into england and um you end up with a lot of english named ports but this one is a 20-year port now that means that it's a mixture of ports of varying ages so there could be some 50-year port in here there could be some five-year port ten-year port but it averages out to 20-year port and they they mix it in such a way to achieve the flavor profile they want but a 20-year port your port is nice because it's not super expensive but very very delicious you know if you get into the really really old ports they can get super pricey and the young ones just don't taste quite as good 20 years right in that happy medium um and uh i forgot what i paid for this but i'll go ahead and display that right now that's what i paid for it so uh this is a very very delicious that's what i'll be sipping on today you can see why they're called dessert wines because they're kind of sweet actually they're quite sweet and they got that syrupy consistency so kind of tastes like a dessert so very very good i do recommend getting yourself some pork to have after dinner especially if you got some friends over but let's talk photography so 35 millimeter i'm gonna tell you about this camera but first i want to tell you about the pictures that i took recently with this camera so uh my friend's 40th birthday um occurred recently and um me and his uh and his wife kind of conspired to put together this surprise trip with uh him and my two brothers and me the four of us went out to uh southern utah and had this great trip um and it was kind of a scavenger hunt the way i set it up so they had these clues that they had to follow to get them to the next location then that that location there'd be another clue which led them to another location anyway i won't go into the details of what all the clues were and all that kind of stuff let's talk about the photography aspect of it so i wanted to document the trip of course i plan on putting a book together for all the attendees um to have a little memento of the of the weekend and um i didn't want to shoot digital because i mean come on but i wasn't really going to do medium format because that's a lot of stuff to lug around with the activities i haven't had in mind it wasn't going to be the right gear for it so i went with 35 millimeter um so i'll show you some of these pictures as i'm talking about it so we started at boulder city which is just outside the hoover dam we had to check out the hoover dam there was a clue there that led us to eventually uh valley of fire state park in nevada and then all of it culminated in us ending up in southern utah and the the real crescendo of the trip the big surprise that i was excited for everyone to see was um i rented this um 4x4 vehicle they're called utvs it's by can-am and um these things are basically uh go-kart dune buggies for off-road racing and um never rented one before never driven one before but i rented one without any of them knowing and then i surprised them at the airbnb i just pulled up in it they had no idea what was happening that day i just said be on the driveway in two minutes and um then i pulled up and so i got to see all the reactions of me pulling up in this crazy you know off-road vehicle and then um we went off-roading my brother drove like an absolute maniac which was so freaking fun it was like being in a roller coaster um but i was shooting pictures the whole time and i did the whole thing on 400 tx so kodak black and white baby i didn't want to shoot any color i wanted it to be you know classic looking i wanted the pictures to age well and i wanted the 35 millimeter look you know deep depths of field for most of it but getting that shallow depth field when i want quick rapid fire kind of photo journalistic type shots 35 millimeter is the perfect uh perfect tool for that and you know i have to say that this whole experience has finally driven home to me how important it is to photograph your own life other photographers say it all the time but i am so terrible about it i don't have pictures of me or my wife or vacations or day-to-day activities i'm just terrible about it but i get it now man it is so freaking important the pictures will mean so much to you and uh i can see that now so i got to be better about photographing my own life in the future um the trip was just an absolute blasty blast it was the the funnest weekend i've had in a long long time and i think my brothers and my friend would uh say the same now uh the pictures i'm very pleased with i think they came out great uh it was a lot of fun shooting black and white only it was a lot of fun fun shooting 35 millimeter because i hadn't done it in a while and it's so much faster and that can take so many more pictures i've gotten so used to medium format in large format that it was just like it was liberating just going out there and and it's not costing you know five dollars every time i click the shutter um really really fun but the equipment i used is the 35 millimeter camera i've had forever so uh this is a canon eos 1v and this camera is really interesting because it's like the last 35 millimeter film camera released before digital took over it's not the actual last i think the nikon f6 came later but it's one of the last it was released in 2000 in the year 2000 so it's got like the latest technology in it and it's built like a tank it's uh weather sealed um it's you know real heavy duty uh metal body and it's um it connects with modern canon lenses it's kind of interesting because it's almost like using a modern dslr but it's shooting film and um you know it has a few philosophical thoughts on that that i want to run by you so um you know when it comes to cameras i think us as analog photographers we always want something sexy some sexy camera you know rangefinder you got the leica you got you know maybe a fuji or something like that something that looks cool looks vintage there ain't nothing sexy about this it looks modern it looks like a dslr with the absence of a screen of course being the main dead giveaway that it's not but um i always kind of shunned this camera in recent years because i thought like no i want to get like a cool range finder i want to have manual advance and i want to have manual focus after using this on the trip f that man get yourself a camera that is you know going to keep up with you on the job don't get me wrong i still love vintage cameras and there's a time and a place for it and uh you know can't go wrong with a leica i'm sure but for this particular situation where i'm shooting very quick rapid fire quickly changing subjects changing light changing moments having a camera with all this modern technology where i can rely on it to not leak light i can rely on it to advance the film for me and i can rely on it to get accurate exposure without me having to carry a separate meter or anything like that it was just super convenient i could really focus on the subject matter and the composition now i brought two lenses with me a 40 millimeter pancake lens that has a max aperture of 2.8 and a 28 millimeter that has a max aperture of 1.8 truth be told though i really only needed to bring the 28 millimeter that's all i used the whole time actually i think i had shot maybe a couple of pictures on the 40 but this was on the camera the whole time nice prime fast lens wide aperture let me handle the low light really well and i wasn't fumbling switching lenses or zooming in or out it's a great way to shoot you know 35 millimeter with a prime uh prime lens um and i shot almost every picture in aperture priority mode i wasn't manually metering i wasn't getting all crazy technical with all this kind of stuff i was letting the camera take care of the metering for me because it's such a modern camera i trusted the metering to do a good job you know ninety percent of the time eighty percent of the time and the times it didn't do a good job it might be a happy accident where it's underexposed or overexposed or you know it'd get me close enough so i kind of let the camera take care of everything that way i could be in the trip i could be at in the moment and i wouldn't be fumbling with cameras camera settings the whole time it worked out really well the metering uh did a great job and um i was real happy with the results now it's a great great system so although it's not super sexy and it's got all the modern accoutrement that kind of strips it of all of its uh vintage you know street cred points it was the perfect tool for the job uh so first and foremost the button layout has always been very intuitive to me and i like it because there's not too many buttons but there's a lot of functions on here so you have your mode button your af button to switch between you know um one shot and ai servo uh you have your metering mode button but you have all these other functions where you can press two buttons at a time to change bracketing or these two buttons to change drive or these two buttons to change the iso it's got you know exposure compensation easily accessible auto exposure lock which definitely comes in handy it's got a rear control dial for adjusting exposure compensation very quickly if you don't want to do it through the button or if you're in manual that's how you um change the aperture can we bleed wyatt's come to say hello don't want to go on the couch all right can hang out here then um so lots of great modern functions um one thing that i particularly love about this camera is the backlight on the screen it's blue i wish all cameras had that canon switched over to orange at some point which is just so much uglier blue is just uh cool and clean looking so it's a not a super sexy camera but that particular feature i think is pretty sexy um so it's a great camera i shot most of the pictures at narrow apertures i just kind of wanted a big depth of field didn't want to have to worry about focus being on the wrong thing too frequently and you know just let the tone out tonalities of black and white photography take over without you know uh going super shallow depths of field or anything like that hey bud i love you too okay let me get back to work though all right back to the 1v so um this camera has a bunch of custom functions like modern dslrs have uh you can change it from you know third stop increments to one stop increments or half stop increments you can have it lead leave the leader tip out on the film which is kind of cool if you develop at home you don't have to actually open the container you can just have it leave the tip out but in addition to the custom functions there's a ton of i think they call them personal functions which you could change through a computer so you could actually get this attachment that connected the camera to your computer you had to be running windows xp so it actually wouldn't even work on a modern computer but there was software where you could go in and change a ton of stuff on it like you could disable any shooting modes you never used so like you could just turn off p mode you could turn off tv mode you can turn off any mode that you never used um and there was a ton of other functions in there not going to play right now dude um there are a ton of other functions in there so if you have an old computer and you get one of those uh cables which those are uh insanely hard to find you could actually customize this camera to an incredible extent um the uh the frames per second i want to talk about that so um it shoots three frames per second uh on its own so three frames per second pretty damn good for film um but if you have the optional um battery pack this turns it into the eos 1v hs hs stands for high speed this is a vertical grip control and it also allows you to power the camera with eight double a batteries but if you put this thing on this will go up to seven frames per second on high speed mode or if you have the nickel hydride pack which i don't it can go up to 10 frames per second imagine that you burn through a roll of 36 in three and a half seconds that gets expensive um but super uh advanced camera it's uh very rugged i've had it for ever it's never needed maintenance it's never failed on me um really really cool camera so you know i i i tend to gravitate towards the the sexy cameras where you got to do everything um get those real vintage points um but i found that this was the perfect tool for the job and anytime i go out on like a trip like this and i want to shoot 35 that's the way i'm gonna go making this difficult dude now onto the next topic so you may have seen the video where i made four framed pieces for a brewery in san diego harlan brewing and they came to me recently and they have another tasting room in a different part of san diego and they wanted to get some of my artwork but they specifically wanted pictures from the area around there and in fact it's near a state park a state reserve called torrey pines state reserve and torrey pines state reserve is a a beautiful park right on the beach with these gorgeous cliffs it's uh dotted with a bunch of torrey pine trees and tory pine trees are pretty rare i think they only grow in like two places in the world and those two places might both be in california if i'm not mistaken but um torrey pines has a bunch of those they wanted pictures of that area so basically they commissioned me to go take some film photos of that area to use in their brewery it's a dream job man that kind of stuff never comes along where you're shooting something you would actually want to photograph and um it's the way you would want to photograph it you know they wanted large format medium format black and white cool looking photos so they kind of let let my artistic license run wild um now planning the shoot was uh a little tricky and here's why so um dude i'm gonna lock you up you're making this way too difficult i know you want to play but i got to work um so planning it there was a cup all right okay coming thank you bud he's a good dog but jesus okay back to the planning of these photos um so uh i knew i wanted to shoot this place at sunrise i'd been there several times before and the pictures i had in mind were going to be best in morning light sunrise was at 6 22 that day the problem was the park didn't open until like 8 am and you really can't get into the park until it's open except for one spot a bunch of the trails up on the cliffs funnel down to the beach and there's a stairway at the beach that brings you back up into the park um that would be the only way to get in before the park opened that uh stairwell pretty damn far from where i needed to park and um sunrise being at 6 22 i wanted to be up on the cliffs by like uh you know 5 30 5 45. so what i ended up having to do is i had to wake up at 4 00 a.m drive an hour to uh just outside the park uh park my car there and then i had to make the journey to those stairs and up to the location i wanted to shoot at so what i ended up doing is i brought my mountain bike and i rode from my car to the stairs and then hiked from the stairs up to the location so it was a one and a quarter mile bike ride on the beach so wet sand in the complete darkness so this was well before the sun rose then i had to make uh like a one mile hike and 500 foot elevation gain a little over 500 foot elegant elevate elevation gain to the first photo spot this was all with 40 plus pounds of camera gear on my back because i had to bring my 6 by 17 and all of its lenses i had to bring my 4x5 i had to bring my tripod of course and my polaroid holder because i wanted to do this on new 55. that's right i wanted to shoot some peel-apart film because they wanted that kind of gritty uh vintage look on these photos so a couple compositions i wanted 6x17 because they had this big long wall that they needed a pano on and then i wanted to shoot some vertical uh new 55s because they had these two pictures they wanted side by side over by the pool table so i had to bring a lot of gear 40 pounds of camera gear riding a mountain bike on sand is tricky i was very close to losing my balance many times and my my quads were burning um so then i had to hike that mile up get in location for a sunrise i got my shot there and then after that i hiked an additional three and a quarter miles uh 400 foot elevate elevation gain 670 foot back and then a mile and a quarter on the bike back to my car so all in all is a very exhausting freaking morning it's just my shoulders were killing me it was a lot of gear and a lot of uh moving around but let me show you the photos so i ended up with a couple of panos that i was pretty happy with um i think the tonalities came out great on black and white i shot kodak 400 tx again and yeah they they came out great and the new 55 i got a few compositions the one i shot at sunrise was worth getting up early and getting to the location because the light was awesome and the tonalities were great and i was real happy that i put in the effort to getting up so early like that um so all in all the trip was a success and then i sent the uh low res scans to the client to have them pick out their favorites they went with two of the new 55 shots and then one of the panos then we started going back and forth on size and all that and we ended up getting the prints made on a hannah mule photo rag paper they came out gorgeous pro photo connection in irvine who does all my printing did an excellent job i scanned everything on my epson um as i always do fluid mounted inverted fluid mount and then took them to my frame them in our in fountain valley and the panoramic the print was uh 62 and a half inches wide by about 21 and 7 8 tall it's kind of a weird size but we were going for an outside dimension that was very specific we wanted the outside dimension to be right around uh 70 inches uh edge to edge so the edge to edge size ended up being 29 by 69 and a half and then the new 55 prints each one was 24 by 30 for a total edge to edge including the frame of 32 and a half by 38 and a half and they came out gorgeous with one big problem the the two new 55 prints they were in an area that i actually didn't realize had so many windows around it but when we went and hung them we all noticed right away you can barely see the prints there's so much glare and reflection on the glass that you can just you can't even see him and that was real depressing to me uh and uh the client you know it didn't make a big stink about it just kind of like oh man there's a lot of glare that's a bummer you know and kind of moved on i went home after delivery they were all happy everyone was happy but it just kept gnawing away at me like every time i go to bed i'd be thinking like it drives me nuts that people can't see those prints it's it's bothering me so much but i should have brought up that we need anti-reflective glass i should have asked you know is there a bunch of windows opposite to it because these pictures are kind of dark they're going to pick up a lot of reflections on regular glass it was really bothering me so i finally decided you know what the professional thing to do uh would be to have the glass switched out for anti-reflective glass no extra charge to the client so what i did is i contacted my frame and i just asked him you know i know this is a pain in the ass but what would it cost for me to bring those two pieces back and for you to put in anti-reflective glass in it he quoted me you know it wasn't super cheap but it was enough within my profit margins that i'm like yeah i'm not going to be able to sleep at night knowing there's a reflection so i got to do it so i reached out to my client i said this is what i want to do it's no cost to you i'll come pick up the pieces i'll take them to the framer i'll have the glass switched out i'll bring them back you don't even need to meet me to do it you'll just come in one day and there'll be less reflections on the glass and uh the client was super grateful about that really appreciated that i you know wanted to make sure the artwork was visible and i wasn't going to put it on them to you know charge them or whatever so that's what i did i took the pieces i drove all the way down to san diego again picked up the pieces brought them back to my framer and had him put in what's known as ultraview glass an ultraview glass has anti-reflective coatings on it that greatly reduce reflections now i used to think that the only option for low reflections was what's called museum glass and museum glass is outrageously expensive so i thought museum glass was the only option but my framer told me there's ultraview both are made by the same manufacturer by the way they're made by trueview but ultraview is exactly the same as museum glass except with slightly reduced uv blocking so museum glass is anti-reflective and it blocks 99 of uv so that's great for really expensive high-end artwork ultraview is anti-reflective and it blocks 70 percent of uv light so still really good uv blocking but just not quite as good as museum um and because hanoi mule photo rack paper is uh pigment prints are already so resistant to fading that i wasn't worried about the you know 29 reduction in uv blocking so i got that ultraview glass put in put the new pieces up and uh the reflections were hugely reduced you could actually see the prints now i can sleep at night the client's happy and the best part of it all and this is why i was more than happy to absorb the cost myself the best part of it all is now i have this learning experience in the future okay this glass is an option this is roughly what it costs i i will know now to ask the client hey are the pieces going to be opposite some really bright windows you know what kind of lighting is it going to be under are they going to have spotlights on it you know you want to feel those things out from your clients so you can really give them the best product and uh that was a big this was a big learning experience for me um so not only did i i get hired to go take some photos that was uh i was able to do exactly the way i wanted to do it you know new 55 shooting at the right time of day shooting the compositions that i wanted um but then i was able to create these gorgeous framed pieces that um you know i love the vibe of perf personally i would i would hang them in my own house no question and uh the most important part the client was super happy so um that's what's been going on in my world a little bit 35 millimeter film and uh shooting some uh black and white for uh for a brewery in san diego go check out the brewery by the way helen harland brewing they have a japanese lager that to me is just love it it's delicious all right i think that's all we're going to talk about i won't be seeing you guys again before the end of the year so merry christmas happy new year um big big thank you to everyone who's watched my videos over the years who's left a comment who's uh sent a contribution my way i'm so grateful for all of you i'm so grateful for um this entire youtube part of my life um and uh yeah thank you so go out and get yourself some taylor flat gate 20 year tawny port it's perfect for the holidays sit next to a nice warm fire look at your christmas tree and soak in a little taylor flat gate but merry christmas happy new year and i'll see you guys soon cheers [Music]

Channel: Nick Carver

Views: 7,304

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Id: QJ4bqHjtmCg

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021