MorseBlog

This is a long rambling post. You have been warned... A New 75mm f4.5 Lens The Lens Nikon 75mm f4.5 SW I bought a 75mm lens for my Intrepid 4x5 fof eBay from Japan. My motivation was to replace my much heavier 90mm Fujinon SWD lens. It is a technically great lens but has much more movement than I need and weighs more than my other lenses.   Now I have purchased 3 similar lenses (90mm, 150m, and 210mm) along with my Fuji GW690III all from Japan through eBay with no trouble. Each was in excellent working order and excellent condition.  This time, however, my experience was different. I waited a week or so for shipping and to clear customs. (In the UK you pay about 20% VAT which FedEx invoiced me for.) The lens arrived well packed, and I opened it up and found it looked to be in immaculate condition. No scratches in the paint or signs of wear were evident on the lens body. The glass was in excellent condition. I fired the shutter at each speed, and they sounded correct. The ...

The next, and probably last of this series of Lith prints using images from Fen Drayton. Actually, these were taken on the same day though each is at either end of my commute. The first is on the Ouse River near St. Ives while the second is past the reserve out on some farmland.  Again, I mixed a batch of EasyLith developer (The last! Wolfgang is sending more as I type this.) as outlined before and microwaved it for three minutes before proceeding. The challenge here again was the uneven development in the darker reflection to gauge the snatch point.  For this print of three trees on the Ouse I settled on a 16x9 composition which is a movie screen format but also works for making a mild panorama. On 8x10 paper this works most closely to 9x5". scan009 f8.5 16 sec Ev 3.1 water This one had decent separation of the tree branches. The lighter upper and lower edges of the print may want some burning. scan010 f8.5 64 sec 32 sec burn above horizon 16 sec below tree reflection Ev 3.1...

My wife got me a Lomograflok film back for my birthday. It took a while to arrive but it got here today. My first impression is it is a quality product. Once you find the online manual (through a QOR code) getting it working is quick and simple. (Loading AA batteries for the ejection mechanism and a film pack.) I made a few test prints in my living room with my dog Mollie as the subject.  For those not familiar with this system it is a large format 4x5 film back that takes Instax Wide instant film that works much like old Polaroids but this film is from FujiFilm. Instax film and cameras are popular so fresh film is readily available. The Wide format gives roughly a 6x9cm image. The film is available in both color and black and white. The packs are 10 sheets per pack and sell for about £14 per pack. LomoGraflok Filmback Instax film (both types) is nominally ISO 800 film. The Lomograflok system comes in two parts. The first is a simple plastic frame for composing and focusing the im...

 To follow on from yesterday's work I had a quick session making another print from this series of images taken on the Fen Drayton RSPB.  This image illustrates the challenges of getting the snatch point correct. In many of the past images it was a matter of waiting for the infectious development to proceed up reed stalks or tree branches until the form was well developed and making sure the highlights did not catch up and begin infectious development.  This one has a mass of trees int he midground made indistinct by the fog. I also wanted to make sure the ripples in the reflection would remain identifiable. In this reflection the bonus would be to get the details of the tree branches.  Again, I made a series of three images with different exposure times. I set up a square crop and set the aperture to f8 to give me an Evof 3.1  (ISO 100) in the water on the left corner.  The best images I managed to snatch at a good time. As mentioned, the diffuse image m...

With my current lith printing jag I have learned how to get satisfactory results quicker than in the past and this has encouraged me to do it more. I also get results that lack the grainy gritty look I don't favor. So, time to dig into the back-catalog. Three of four storms have blown through the last week or so and this has kept me stuck at home.  I recalled several years ago photographing on a bicycle ride to work on a wonderfully foggy day. It was one of my first times photographing in fog and I believe I had just bought my Fuji 690 GSW camera.  So, with a couple of rolls of HP5+ I went to work but taking my time enough to capture 2 rolls worth along the way. The bike path follows an old railway bed and so travels through the countryside including some old gravel quarries turned into an RSPB reserve near the village of Fen Drayton.  I metered with my Sekonic 308 and overexposed the fog by one to two stops. The fog was extremely heavy (almost too much so) and being wedd...

I watch a fair few Vlog/YouTube videos of landscape photographers. I mostly stay with the film crowd as this is my interest, but I do watch the likes of Thomas Heaton and a few others who shoot digital. I can't (and probably shouldn't) watch too many of these. They become a bit repetitive, can become a substitute for actual photography, and negatively influence the ability to develop one's own style.  I am also aware how powerful they are as selling tools. You watch a series of videos, maybe comment, and form a kind of relationship with the artist. You then see them taking photos and now have some attachment or back-story (in the antique and art world provenance) for the image which gives the image more personal meaning.  Nothing wrong with all of this, in many ways this is a brilliant model for artists to promote and sell their work. It is not much different from galleries having artists in to talk to prospective clients. I also celebrate the lack of gatekeepers. There is ...

I suppose lith and toning for me is as close as one gets to alchemy. Most of the rest of film and paper development is scientific with formulas, processes, and repeatable results. Lith and toning much less so. I also suppose this is the basis of my love hate relationship with them. They hold the promise, often illusive, of a more delicate or powerful image. I have had my share of what I at least think of as success and that tantalizes and draws me back to being the alchemist for a few hours.  This session is no different. Toning on lith is certainly an area I am still finding my balance in. Lith for me has become usefully predictable as I hone my methods, while not completely taming its ability to completely transform an image.  Some of the images I printed in the last of the lith session on the series Conclave for the Alders I set about toning. Today my emphasis was on iron blue toning using the Moersch MT7 kit which I am getting to the end of now. This means I will need to r...

 Another day, another day in the darkroom. The morning dawned bright and clear; a flawed full moon shown in the west while Venus has risen quite high-up in the eastern sky, the gradient of light-yellow fading to cornflower blue in the east pricked by this one unfailing light. Mollie and I are out for our morning walk around the village, this time to some fields. She noses under the gate and is off like a shot sprinting along the hedgerows as fast as her little legs can carry her. She has that unbounded joy today and perhaps because a terrible storm blew through last night, she feels a sense of relief or release in this clear dawn. As we cross the fields, she zigs then zags in front of me from one hedgerow to the next, joy and happiness with each bounding exertion.  This morning after coffee, cereal and some light reading I decided to address some errors from yesterday and re-print some liths. I have some 8x10 sheets left from previous experiments, some of Seagull Exhibition pa...

After my initial conventional print success , I wanted to see how the image would translate with a lith print. I took the 8x10 image that was exposed at f32 down to f16 for the requisite overexposure. I know if I can hit an Ev (ISO 100) on the easel in some mid tones that is a good start at 32 second exposure for a higher contrast lith print. This came at f16 in this case. I made two exposed prints at this exposure then opened up one more stop to f11 at 32 seconds. I did not burn the top of the images, though I should have.  Normally these images end up taking a darker look but, in this case, they were warmer toned versions of the original prints.  I mixed Moersch EasyLith as follows 20ml Part A 20ml Part B 700ml old Brown 300ml water Heat in microwave for 3 minutes.  When I stuck the first print in the hot developer brought up an image in one minute and I had to snatch it at around 3 minutes. It went black fast! Subsequent images slowed down but none were outside a 5-mi...

Sometimes you see an image and you feel it will really work. (Update: I should clarify the trees here are not Alders as I suggest but are Hawthorne. They don't get this big often, but I felt something was wrong with my identification, so I went back to gather more data.) Image for blog post heading Last month I broke out my Fuji GSW 690 and started to take it around with me, when I was just out for a walk or when I had my large format with me.  It is a difficult camera to get my head around especially when in the forest. A wide angle on a wide negative, you need to get close to most subjects. But I have gotten some nice images. I wrote up my impressions of the camera here ... The day was partly cloudy at Holme Fen and not great conditions for photography but not poor either. I was in an area I have been drawn to in the past with these two alder trees. I could never make anything work in any season I was there. The old problem of visual complexity. It is difficult to photograph tree...

I have fallen into favor of the small print of late. I had been in the thrall of larger prints for a long time, usually preferring 16x20 prints. However smaller prints in addition to being more pragmatic have their own distinct charm. They invite you to get closer and to appreciate the details and textures more.  Back in 2020 I started refining my own style of framing  of small prints. I eschewed many of the traditional techniques and worked towards some more stripped back. The impetus in part was due to my use of Ilford Art 300 paper which is a cotton rag paper with a rich texture. Rather than hide this behind glass I opted not to glaze the framed prints. I also opted to not use mounts and depended instead on generous borders. Some examples on display here...  The frames I made by hand were simple and fabricated in pine. Later I went from painting the frames to using the Japanese technique of Yakisugi which is a wood treatment made by partially charring the wood with a f...

I continue on this journey today with some more experiments. First, I am still trying to extract warmer tones with Fish and Chips being part of this process. Fish and Chips is a rehalating bleach based on potassium permanganate as the bleach agent and the use of sodium chloride as the source of the halogen rather than the traditional potassium bromide.  The impetus was to be able to develop and tone silver chloride in the bleached areas. The trouble is my only source of warm tone developer is the lith developer EasyLith. Today I recalled that I have some old Ilford Universal PQ developer that I stopped using as I don't like the warmish tone it delivers. The trouble is that Universal PQ is formulated with both KBr (Potassium Bromide) and BZT (Benzotriazole) as a restrainer. BZT delivers a cool tone while KBr contributes warmer tones.  I took some test prints from the prior session that had been developed in Moersch ECO 4812 developer to get a neutral to cold tone print. I the...