MorseBlog

I was contemplating other ways of explaining the problems of underexposing film as discussed in an earlier post. One thought experiment was to use reciprocity failure to exagerate the effect. This lead me to recall Fomapan 100’s atrocious reciprocity failure and to speculate there may be a ‘death spiral’ for shadows under certain conditions of reciprocity failure. Indeed the few times I used this film in large format I found it very contrasty with thin shadows. This also lead me to read up more about reciprocity failure and I learned and confirmed a few other things. Let's start with the Fomapan 100 Reciprocity correction... Fomapan 100 Reciprocity Correction (hat tip   Magna Images) My thought experiment is as follows… Assume you meter a scene and Zone V and at the desired aperture this leads to a 1 second shutter speed. This is not unusual in my large format experience. That means Zone IV would have 1 stop less light and zone III would be 2 stops less light. Zones IV and III is w...

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 ...

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. 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 negati...

Previous posts showed how I built and tested my 8x10 camera. Ugly but it so far works quite well. I have more work planned for it (blackening the interior, adding a landscape mounting, shutter etc) For now I wanted to try real film. As mentioned before 8x10 film is expensive which is why people often use paper negatives or ortho lith film for economy. Silverprint had some Fomapan 100 8x10 on sale so I got a pack of 50 sheets. Fomapan is popular because it is so economical. It has trouble with being contrasty and it has very high reciprocity failure so is difficult for long exposures. Many people like it in fact and I have learned recently how to tame contrast in film. I took two photos in my back garden. The first I focused on the chair back and the second the brick wall. I wanted to see about depth of field. I metered the scene at ASA 80 to help with the contrast I would give a slight over exposure and then under-develop the film. Both shots were the same exposure 1/2 sec at f45. ...

One can find old large format film on ebay for some pretty good prices (£4 -25 sheet 4x5). The question is, is it any good? I had accumulated some Plus-X (ASA 125, expired 1968) and some Tri-X (ASA 320 Expired 1985). I compare the Plus-X  to unexpired Fomapan 100 which is a very economical choice for B+W film. I find Fomapan to be a bit contrasty compared to Ilford Delta the only other large format film I have experience with. I ran this through my MPP MKIII large format. This is a camera I bid on but did not expect to win. I find it is rather intense and time consuming to use and as such is not good to use when you are out with others. Consequently it has seen limited use. The lens is a Fuji 210mm f5.6 which is a joy to use and reasonably priced. I took identical photos with each film to compare. I rated the Plus-X at 2 stops slower to compensate for age. This gave me ASA 30 for the Plus-X. I stop it right down to f64 so exposures got out to 1 second on the Plus-X in dayligh...

Still on my film rampage. I have shot some B&W film around the UK. There is a lot of B&W film around though some makers like Agfa are out of business. I ordered some Fuji as this is more prevalent in the UK than Kodak. The company sent me a roll of Fomapan as well. Turns out Foma is Czech company from the Soviet days. They make film B&W film the old fashion way. I took the Fomapan to North Yorkshire a few weeks ago when we visited Vicki's parents. On the way home we stopped by Rievaulx Abbey which was a Cisterian Abbey built around 1000 AD. It thrived for a few hundred years but was closed by Henry VIII during his reformation of the Catholic Church. It fell into ruins which are impressive even today. Vicki used to play in the ruins when she was growing up. It is now an English Heritage site. On the ridge above the Abbey there are a series of follies. Here is the Abbey from the Rye river valley floor. It was mostly an overcast day at this point. This is the view from t...