MorseBlog

This didn't start out as a comparison but the results of my first print I suppose made it inevitable.   I have been taking a lot of 45 photographs in the last few months. Fall and Winter seem to be the times I break out my Intrepid 4x5 and spend mornings in the local woodlands. This has left me with an itch to get back in the 'The Beast' and print some images. The Beast is my ancient Durst 4x5 enlarger I got for free. In a recent post I made some contact prints of a couple of 4x5 negatives and decided I should make larger prints. I started out with the birch trees I contacted printed earlier. That contact print was done on Ilford MGFB Classic matte paper.  Adox MCC 110 Paper I was going to cut down some 16x20" MGFB paper into 8x10 sheets but I found some Adox MCC 110 glossy FB paper so my laziness moved me to use this paper. I bought some of this paper a couple of years ago based on someone online exclaiming its deep blacks etc. The paper is good but not quite what ...

 This is a photo I took with my Fuji GSW 690 (65mm f5.6 lens on a 6x9 negative). Taken on Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 800 for the dark winter conditions. The occasion was a visit to North Yorkshire to help my wife look after my father-in-law last winter. Sadly he passed not long after this and I will miss such a gentle and intelligent man.  I shot this on a cold wet December day. There was not a lot to inspire me but I whimsically decided for a reflection in the puddle. I had to lower the tripod right down near the ground to have the puddle occupy all the viewfinder. Then should I focus on the the reflection or the bottom of the puddle which was covered in dead leaves like a mosaic? I focused on the reflection and had enough depth of field to catch the puddle bottom. Water was dripping from the tree branches overhead and so I set a reasonably fast shutter speed of 1/30 to 1/60th second. I wanted to catch the ripples from a droplet. I then poised with the cable release until I ha...

This is another in my series of hunting for a good developer/exposure regime for HP5+ film on my 4x5. I am taking a more subjective and less sensitometry-based approach to this film. I started here . (For FP4+ I took the sensitometry route in an earlier blog post here .) I aimed to take two images of the same subject under similar lighting. The subject is a hide on the edge of Holme Fen overlooking Trundle Mere, a small pond. I took an image at my new provisional EI of 200 metering to place the shadows in zone III. I then took an image at box speed EI 400 with the same objective. The EI 200 images I made with f22 while the EI 400 were at f32 with the same shutter speed. (Blog page cover image) I developed the image exposed at EI 200 in HC-110 dilution H at 8 minutes at 21C (this is -20% of the recommended nominal time of 10 minutes) Previously I had tried an image at 7 minutes (-30%) at EI 200 so I was trying a slightly longer development.  EI 200 Developed 8 minutes HC-110 dilutio...

A couple of my recent black and white prints from Holme Fen I decided to contact print. I don't contact print often so my methodology is not refined or honed by practice. I use my enlarger and printing easel and just add a sheet of plain window glass to sandwich the negative to the paper. Since I had two negatives I wanted to print them at once to save some time. I arranged the negatives on a sheet of Ilford MGIV Classic FB paper. A further complication is that I do split grade printing generally and making two test prints simultaneously present a slightly greater challenge as I had to expose for soft and hard filters. I considered just digging out my grade 2 filter but resolved a method to get split grade printing to work.   First I would make the test print with the soft (#00) filter from one direction across both negatives. Then I would make the hard filter (#5) test prints orthogonal to the soft filter intervals by using two black cards to block each strip of exposure incr...

This particular morning was overcast but as Mollie and I drove to Holme Fen there was a light mist in the air and some hope of heavier mist. I headed to a covert I had been to many time before as the forest is more open there. Part of the frustration of woodland photography is how crowded the scene is and the difficulty keeping distracting features like branches and weeds out of the scene. Also the reduction of visual complexity so crucial to a good photo is made more complicated with a jumbled and crowded scene.  Most of the bracken has now browned in this area of the forest. The silver birch leaves are mostly blown out form some gales that blew through about a month ago. Now however the oaks are getting a nice orange/brown palette.  Here in the UK we are having a long period of fall cover, probably one of the longest in a long time. Listening to the radio I had confirmed what I suspected last year and disabused of another notion. The leaves turn color mostly as a result of s...

Call me stupid. I have been doing large format since late 2013. A set of problems confronted by large format photographers is keeping track of film holders. They inherently lack identity and once film has been put in one it is impossible to tell what is in there without the trouble of safely opening it up.  My First Large Format Image Nov 2013 (Ilford Delta 100 MPP MKIII) This wasn't much of a problem in the beginning as I only had one film type Ilford Delta 100 then later some Fomapan 100 when The Delta was used up. This problem became acute when I purchased new and expired film a few years ago and accumulated over 700 sheets of film. Now I have Ilford FP4+ HP5+, Fuji Astia, Velvia 50 and 100, Provia, Pro 400H, Kodak Ektar, Ektachrome, Portra 160, Portra 400 and probably something else I have forgotten. You get the picture, lots of film types to keep track of.  Recent Alex Burke had said in a livestream that he has standardized on  Portra 160. Mostly to simplify things e...

I took Mollie to Holme Fen again this last week. She enjoys these woods especially much and I go there now for her preference as much as mine. She sprints down the trails and takes in the heady scents of this moist woodland. It seems to bring her more energy.  We were following some fainter trails grown over in some areas with now-brown bracken. She is a short rather sausagy terrier mix so her short legs present a challenge in thick undergrowth. She adapts however and tunnels under where she can but has also innovated a spy-hop where she jumps over the bracken. She leaps over a section with her body nearly vertical and this raises her head and she surveys where to jump next. In this way she can follow the trails deer have left with a series of these spy-hops. As her confidence has grown she enjoys jumping on the springy matted bracken as she romps about the forest.  We carried on down one of these trails for a while not really finding anything photographic. I had my Intrepid 4...

I am re-evaluating my development of Ilford HP5+. I use HC-110 as my standard developer and have a good routine for measurement and development with it. Recently I was not happy with a 4x5 negative that seemed a bit contrasty and either underexposed or under developed. I used Kodak’s recommended 5 minutes in HC-110 dilution B at 20C. I am also trying to avoid full calibration of film and developer.  Beech Grove (HP5+ developed HC-110 dilution B 5 minutes 20C.) I have also been re-reading some David Kachel articles. David is very opinionated, a bit of a contrarian but I believe knowledgeable. He also has this ability to make you think you will never measure up :). In his article  Are You Using the Wrong Film Speed?  he points out that contrary to many practitioners of the zone system determining you film speed is actually not that important. This chimes with my own thoughts and in a footnote he answers the question by saying that in the end most people who determine thei...

I recently made 4 images of a set of leaves in my village. The colors looked spectacular as I walked Mollie in the morning. So I set off from my house with the Intrepid pre-set and focused for looking at the ground so I would minimize the setup time and fuss in public. I hate photographing, especially large format, with an audience as I feel self-conscious and then have difficulty focusing on the task. Having the camera pre-set and mounted on the tripod slung over my shoulder should minimize my time there.  It turned out to be more troublesome than I thought as the wind was strong and gusty and I had underestimated the degree to which the wind moved the leaves. Indeed minute to minute my entire palette of leaves might change as new ones dropped in and others were scrambled on the ground.  I setup the tripod in an area of leaves. It was difficult to decide a 'composition' as it was just a mat of random leaves. My first photo I took on Fuji Astia. I have a lot of the stuff and i...

Part I I have been looking for new forests recently that are close but different from the ones I have ben visiting regularly for the last couple fo years. My wife ad I took Mollie to Thetford forest and I amongst the plantation pines there are some more wild beech forests. So a couple of weeks ago Mollie and I got up early and we headed to an area near Two Mile Bottom.  We trekked through pine forest and along forest roads and stumbled upon an area of beech forest with its clean vegetation-free floor littered with beech nuts. The leaves were still quite green on most trees as this has been a warm fall with no frosts. The grass on the walk up held heavy drops of due and my boots were soon soaked through. Wind whipped in gusts through the tree tops. Coming upon this beech forest next to a farmer's field we could see and hear the early potato harvesting activity. I setup the Intrepid with a 150mm lens. The sky was mostly cloudy so it was appropriate to use some chrome film (Fuji Astia...