Large Format Flowers

I sometimes watch Tim Layton's YouTube channel. Tim grows his own flowers and makes very large prints of the flowers; he uses an 8x10 large format camera to capture them and then prints on silver gelatin up to 30x40 inches. The prints look impressive online and must be more so in person.

Now I don't have quite so nice a setup but noticed that some gladiolas in bloom in our garden and thought I should give this a shot myself on my 4x5 camera. Tim speands a lot of time getting the lighting setup correctly and while I don't have the dedicated space and background for this I made a small setup in our hall where a skykight two floors up casts a very diffuse light from the ceiling. I wasn't sure if this would be good or not but let's see what results I get! I placed a piece of white card behind the flowers and one underneath to reflect some light upwards as well.

The simple lighting setup I used.

I already had some pre-loaded Fomapan 100 film in film holders and some Portra 400 color so I decided to start with these. The Foma is a brutal film for low light and while cheap I increasingly am disatisfied with results I get with it. I find it too contrasty under normal development and the emulsion often has flaws in it. In this case I would come to regret the reciprocity failure the film is infamous for.

I setup my MPP MKIII camer with a Fujinon f5.6 210mmm lens. I took care to compose and focus the image. The light levels were low in the scene and so I had to work patiently. (I do not see how one could work with an f8 (or lower) lens for focus and composition in low light!.)

Next I calculated my depth of focus. I find this website very useful. At f45 it indicated about 2.5 inches in frotn and 2.9 inches behind the point of focus would be in focus.

The flowers consists of a dark purple flower and a light pink flower. This I hoped would provide a challenge to balance the exposure. Fortunately in the diffuse light the range of EVs was about 3 stops. I used my Pentax spot meter. For metering I used the dark flower and for the first exposure I read an EV of 5 at ASA 100. I placed this first at Zone V after some internal debate. I reasoned that this dark flower I would want to keep as much detail as possible while keeping the lightest part of the pink flower in zone VII. This would give an exposure of 1 minute at f45. With reciprocity it works out at 16 1/2 minutes!

I decided to compromise and expose at f32 for 30 secs but with reciprocity for Fomapan this is close to 7 minutes. (Here I made my first mistake the day. Having set the lens initially to f45 I forgot to rest it to f32 after I changed my mind.) The result of my mistake was to underexpose by one stop. I made the same mistake on the next exposure which I purposely under exposed a full stop at 15" or 2 1/2 minutes with reciprocity.

The next pair of images I exposed properly at f32 for 50 seconds (13 minutes with reciprocity) and 30 seconds at f32 (6:51 with reciprocity). These I developed normally in Ilford LC29. These suffered from non-uniform development perhaps due to insufficient agitation or depleted developer. (I suspect the later as I have kept my usual regimen for agitation.) Some problems with the film that looked like small scratches but were actually black lines in the developed emulsion. I initially thought they were dust or fibers but they seem part of the emulsion. I present here the scanned and cleaned images. The exposures were good I think and in excellent focus.  The images would have been good without the film trouble.

f32 at 6:51 minutes Fomapan 100. Dark flower at EV 4 placed at Zone IV.

f32 at 13 minutes Fomapan 100. Dark flower at EV 4 1/3 placed at Zone V.

The exposures I had accidentally set to f45 and under-exposed one stop I developed at N+2 at 40% extra development time. This would push the development one stop and I hoped garner some more contrast for the small range of the lit flowers. The first results above suffered from some non-uniform development so I mixed a fresh batch of Ilford LC29 developer for these. By and large the push worked well, particularly for the properly exposed shot.

Fomapan 100 at f45 2:30 minute N+2 development (+40%)

Fomapan 100 at f45 7 minute N+2 development (+40%) (best)

Somewhat disappointed with the Fomapan performance I setup to shoot the same flowers in the morning though this time I would break out the Ilford FP4+. I shot them at nearly the same exposure. However the long exposures encountered another hazard as one flower had moved during a 20 minute exposure and so was blurred. As such I was left with one decent image. Again I metered on the dark flower again at EV 4-2/3 which I placed at zone 5. The meter gave 1:20 minute exposure which was 10:30 minutes with reciprocity.

With the Ilford negatives I tried N+1 development (+20%) and really substantially over-developed the film. I am interested to see if it will print in the darkroom. I scanned it here and got reasonable results. It is either grainy from over-development or noise from the scanner due to the high density of the highlights.

Ilford FP4+ ASA 100 f45 10:36 minutes.

I will amend this when the color film returns from the lab.

Update: Color Version

The two color exposures returned from Peak Imaging. One had clear evidence a flower moved during the exposure forming a double image. The other turned out well. I scanned the film in two passes (left and right side of negative)  as 48-bit tiff files in Vuescan then stitched using Composite Imaging Editor (free from Microsoft) and inverted using ColorPerfect SW. The film is expired (2014) Portra 400.

The photo shown here was metered at EV 4-1/3 on the dark flower and this was placed at zone 5. Exposed at f45 at 20 seconds (60 seconds with reciprocity).

Kodak Portra 400 (expired) f45 60 seconds