MorseBlog

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...

 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...

Background On the back of my previous panoramic print (We Are So Small in the Eye of God) I am encouraged to take another image through to completion. I have selected one I mentioned in a previous blog post . This image was taken at Holywell Pond in the RSPB reserve at Fen Drayton. It is a classic early spring scene at the refuge which consists of a series of abandoned gravel pits that are now tree-lined lakes for waterfowl. Holywell Pond is used by fishermen (as are most of the lakes in the reserve) and so has a few small wooden platforms dotted around the edge. I took this photo mid-morning in early spring trying to capture the look of the trees perched on the edge of the water. I cycle past this on my commute to work and the image had grown on me. I photographed it with my Fuji G617 panoramic camera with a 90mm lens. The negative is about three times long as it is high. The scanned negative of the image is as follows. Composition Thoughts As before, my challenge with the...

Back in February when I took the photos made in this previous post . I also took along my Fuji G617 panoramic camera. I managed only one photo but it was one I really wanted to see. So I finally got out to take some photos at the local RSPB refuge at Fen Drayton. (I feature my photos from here at another blog called At The Water's Margin .) The first photo on this roll however I had anticipated quite a lot. On the way to Lynwood Arboreteum I drove through the middle of the Fens on a rather bleak looking day. The Fens were created in the reign of Charles II and drained with the help of the Dutch much like Holland was. As a result it is unremittingly flat around here. The sky is immense and intimidating. My wife feels quite anxious driving through this area. I too feel something almost dark and foreboding when the weather is gray. My family is from the Midwestern US so I am no stranger to flat lands... As I drove alone I really wanted to capture the mood and so looked for a safe ...

I decided now at the end of this year to go through the exercise of defining and selecting my best landscape photos of 2018. I wanted to make the list short so figured on 6 photos and finally ended with 7. I started with a short list of 18 from the 378 film photos I took this year. The process of whittling the short list down was not too easy. I rejected ones that had imperfect focus, bad film, or were not strictly landscape images. Here they are in roughly what I think is reverse order leading up to the best. Here is a video summary of the same photos... Whernside:  Force Gill.  (Fuji 690 GSW--Ilford FP4+) This I took as we hiked up Whernside in Yorkshire. Initially it seemed wrong to feature this waterfall from such a distance with a wide angle lens (65 mm). However on reflection I became really taken with the composition. A conventional photo would have made the waterfall fill the frame substantially. This places it in the broad open country of the Yorkshir...

Having acquired my Intrepid Mk3 4x5 camera I was keen to try it out. I assembled it and took it out to the local RSPB Reserve at Fen Drayton. My objective was to give the camera a decent workout, try out the 6x9 roll film holder, test out a 90mm Mamiya Press camera lens as well. The results were a mixed bag of good and bad, some joy and frustration. It didn't help I was recovering from a trip to Asia and a cold as well. I started out tired and frustrated but ended up immersed in the joy of photography with large format. For film I only loaded on film holder with Ilford FP4+. I had recently done some calibration of my development and exposure along the lines of the zone system and wanted to see a real result. So I had two 4x5 images to experiment with. I also brought along my MPP 6x9 roll film holder back to try on the Intrepid. The Mk3 supports a universal back which is different from the prior version of the camera. This would give me 8 exposures again of Ilford FP4+. All fi...

I finally got delivery of my Fuji GSW690 6x9 camera with 65mm f5.6 lens. The so called Texas Leica medium format rangefinder camera. It is a beast and but for the rangefinder aspect suits my preferences for cameras. Manual, simple, and medium format. The only time I have shot 6x9 is when I take out my Zeiss Ikonta from the 1930s. Bought very cheaply the Ikonta works surprisingly well. Fuji GSW690iii I loaded up some Ilford FP4+ so I could have the result when I got home. (I had tested the shutter speeds using a fast frame rate video camera at home and they all seemed accurate.) I then headed out to the Fen Drayton RSPB refuge near where I live. This is a close-by place that allows some good scenery and is relatively quiet so I can get on with photography without a lot of distraction. It was a warm and very cloudy day and it made for a pleasant few hours out. I took my meter, tripod, and 67mm yellow filter along with the beast. I wanted to test a few different shutter speeds and s...