Some more experiments and photos with the Big Eye (Big Guy) . Again on Fomapan 100. I don't really have the means to lug the camera about yet so having found
Jim Galli's website he does some simple still life images which I find inspiring to give it a try.
The first is a small bronze horse statue on a table. I lit it with room light which was a mix of artificial and natural light. Basically I turned on the lights and opened the drapes! I metered it at ASA 80 and f8 at 4". For Fomapan the Reciprocity failure is very high. See the table below.
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| Reciprocity Failure for Fomapan 100 |
For 1-10 seconds I need to multiply the exposure by 2 so that makes it 8 seconds at f8. I developed it again in HC-110 this time I moved from 6 ml to 5 ml as there are different opinions on the amount of HC-110 required to develop a sheet of film. I mixed this at the same ratio as before (1+63) and so added 320 ml of water. The development time was 8:06 minutes. This is the resulting negative.
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| Negative at f8 8 second exposure ASA80 |
Very good I think not too contrasty. Printing I started with test strips at f16 and an enlarger height of 31cm. These again are contact prints. I tried just the #5 filter at 23 seconds first. The contrast is strong and works and most of the carving detail on the horse is clear. The blacks are deep.
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| Chinese Horse f16 #5 23 sec #0 0 sec |
I made a number of other prints and was most satisfied with this one. A more gentle tonal range though the scan does not do it justice..
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| Chinese Horse f16 #5 16 sec #0 8 sec |
Again the depth of field is very small. At f8 and 3 ft from the subject it is 4/10ths of an inch in front and 4/10ths of an inch behind the subject. Hence the right front foot is out of focus. There is an aberration in my printing process however. Below the horse's rear leg is a white spot also on the left side of the paper and one or two harder to see areas. These are not present on the negative and not on the glass I use to make contact prints. They are seen consistently on all prints even with different negatives. The must be some kind of internal reflection. More investigation required.
Update: Further investigation shows some dust in the empty negative carrier. I thought I raised the enlarger head high enough to make the dust diffuse. Clearly not the case.I discovered it by placing a white card under the enlarger and moving it slowly towards the lens. Soon the dust came into focus and was more obvious.
The next photo is Cow Kachina. Unfortunately the camera shifted, perhaps during removal of the dark slide so composition is poor and crops the top of the Kachina and is off center. I also had to move the camera back about 6 inches. This photo I shot at ASA 80 f22 which metered at 30". The Fomapan 100 reciprocity chart indicates 8x so 4 minutes. I ran the same developer (HC-110 5+320) but went back to the original Massive Dev Chart time of 9:00 minutes. I did this to see if the reduced developer content made a difference.
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| Cow Kachina Negative at f22 4 minute exposure ASA80 |
The negative shows denser with the extra development. I then printed exactly as my best Chinese Horse print.
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| Cow Kachina f16 #5 16 sec #0 8 sec |
Under exposed now due to longer development time. Next one is more like it.
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| Cow Kachina f16 #5 23 sec #0 11 sec |
The depth of field is somewhat better but still only +/- 2.5 inch. The result of more development time was a negative with higher contrast I will go back to my old time of 8:06 minutes.
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