How I photograph the Milky Way with medium format film
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
I don’t understand why the C41 (negative) process/product became default for consumer grade color photography. I know there’s professional negative film that’s tuned for the human skin. But as an amateur that happened to snag a lot of really high quality (mostly 135) film in bulk on eBay, I’ve always felt overall happier with my legible developed film, the highly contrasted and colorful images and the noticeable flavor of different product lines.
Much better dynamic range, which means you can throw a c41 roll in any camera with an half working meter and you'll get an usable picture. Over or under expose a slide by 1 stop and you're already asking for troubles.
Negatives are also much easier to scan than positives, and possibly easier to print but I'm not very familiar with that.
As of now they're pretty much the only way to dark-room print from color film as there is no more paper or chemicals for color-positive prints being made anymore. There used to be Cibachrome/Ilfochrome which was apparently highly regarded, but production of that ended a couple years ago.
Apparently there's a way to reversal process regular RA-4 color paper, but I never tried it. Essentially you expose your paper, then process it in black&white chemistry. After that you wash the paper and expose it again with white light. You then process the paper in RA-4 color chemistry. What's kinda cool about the second processing is that you can do it in the light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry6ycSgT8g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNjLzzH438E
Random link: <$3 a roll...
https://www.freestylephoto.biz/102036-Tetenal-Colortec-E-6-D...
Beautiful shots, I particularly like the double-exposure self-portrait at the end, knowing it was made in-camera. I used to do B&W star tracks because getting a mechanical tracker to work accurately was so fiddly before. I like the idea of using pole-finding and star-tracking digital cameras and software, I know satellites and some planes use it, but I didn’t realize it was available off-the-shelf.
Really cool to see artists keeping these formats alive. I do a lot of digital work, and I don’t think format alone defines the art — but again, there’s some real magic in film.
I'm not the photographer from the article BTW...
It's called an equatorial mount! GAH!
Incidentally that setup they post a picture of looks pretty sketchy, looks like the counterweight will bonk the table if you expose for too long and you also have to move the table rather than the mount to point in another azimuth.
Understandable I guess, but considering the amazing resolution you can get from medium format, this just really leaves me itching to see a large image.
If you have the opportunity avail yourself of it.
I can probably give a better recommendation if you have a particular goal in mind. There are plenty of guides on how to take photos of the Milky Way with an SLR, but astrophotography is a broad (and quickly very expensive) field to get into.
If you're interested in a more technical angle, you can look at the Handbook of CCD Astronomy (Howell, 2006) which also discusses noise issues in detail. Nowadays we're moving to CMOS though. However when you go for astrophysics books they tend to focus more on measuring intensities accurately (photometry) rather than getting pretty pictures.
Although one nitpick with the article - tracking mounts do not follow the rotation of the Earth, they rotate in the opposite direction.
Maybe I missed something, but I don't see where the article contradicts what you wrote above. The one thing I did find seems correct (as it doesn't specify the direction):
"With film and these very long exposures, the Earth’s rotation is a big problem — you’ll end up with star trails (which is a fun type of photo to take). The solution to this problem is a star tracker, a mount that precisely rotates your camera at the same rate as the Earth (known as sidereal rate)."
The key is to find the places where you can see the milky way and to plan ahead - a moonless and cloudless night is important. There are websites[1] and tools[2] or that.
Some results based on the above, with minimal post processing (as I'm not good at it): https://miahi.ro/photos/perseide-2017/. The first series is at ~1500m altitude and 70km distance of any large city.