I tried to provide a variety of subjects in this submission. All are taken with a Mercury Stereo 12, with a variety of lenses.  And perhaps most interestingly, none of these are shot on contemporary slide films.  Three of the four are shot on negatives and printed to slides using M-Alchemy‘s new M-Chrome process, while one is shot on 40-year old Ektachrome 64!

Surrounded

I thought this and the following shot would make a nice diptych! The model is Helena .  This was shot with the Mercury Stereo 12, with one of my favorite lenses: the Schneider Super Angulon 47mm. I’m always looking for the right subject for this fantastic lens! This was shot on 65mm 500T IMAX film and printed as an M-Chrome. The shot contains very bright sunlight as well as deep shadows. No slide film could have captured this, but I was pleased to see that the significantly higher latitude of Vision 3 film and the M-Chrome process was able to retain a great deal of detail in the highlights and shadows.

Caged

I shot this on the Stereo 12 with Mamiya 105mm lenses, to get a radically different feel from the shot it’s paired with. I tried to soften the background a bit via selective focus to obscure the fact that I’m slightly exceeding my depth budget. Generally the eyes don’t try to focus on out-of-focus details, but this is all experimental! Let me know how it works for you! Shot on 65mm 500T IMAX film and printed as an M-Chrome. The negative got a little brutalized on this one, adding some scratches.  (The image shown here was a different take than the slide; the slide version is better, but we only scanned this take.)

Galapagos Boardwalk

This was from atop Bartolomé island in the Galapagos. On this island, the one that most influenced Charles Darwin, no visitor is allowed to set food on the natural rocks and soil of the island, as part of its extraordinary ecological protection. The result is that when one sets foot on the island, one must walk from the dock to the boardwalk seen here. A trail then wends through the peaks of the island in a large loop. From this vantage I was able to capture the somewhat strange sight of the boardwalk, as well as a cactus-like plant that I had never seen before, but found alien and beautiful. Taken with my Mercury Stereo 12 on Kodak E100 film with Mamiya 80mm lenses.

Visitor From Another World

[Image missing for now–will find and add later]

I watched this amazing fungus grow for several months before finally taking this image. I used a Rollei 6006 to shoot this as a sequential macro, as I had it loaded with special 65mm Double-X film (made specially for the movie Oppenheimer, and given to me by the folks who worked on that film) for another project. This was partially a test of the Mercury Stereo Toolkit app for MF3D, to see if real world results would vindicate its calculations for macro 3D. I think it nailed it! This is an M-Chrome. I discovered that Double-X BW film makes really spectacular M-Chromes. I shouldn’t have been surprised: it is a negative film designed specifically to make film prints! 80mm lens.