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 ...

Last year I was watching a Steve O'nions' video where he used a Horsman 6x12 roll filmback on his Intrepid 4x5. I had picked up years ago an old 6x9 MPP filmback that I have used on the Intrepid I have. I am a sucker for the panoramic format (I really enjoy shooting a Fuji G617.) so when I saw the 6x12 I thought that might be something I could use.  With rollfilm backs on a 4x5 the inevitable question why not just crop the 4x5 image? The usual response is economics. 120 film is cheaper than the 4x5 equivalent. Processing is easier to find as well and more affordable.  I researched 6x12 backs and stumbled across the SINAR film backs and the Zoom model in particular. These backs fit like a sheet film holder and so do not require the ground glass to be removed for each image. The Zoom model allows one to shoot a variety of formats on the same roll of film. This means 6x12, 6x9, 6x8, 6x6, and 6x4.5. I am a sucker for versatility and fortunately at the time I found one for sale fo...

As soon as I got the film developed from my woodland photography I wanted to print some of it. I started out with one of the 4x5 negatives. All of these negatives however are big enough to need my ‘ Beast ’ enlarger. Birch and Grass The Beast is on the third floor (American reference) (second floor British reference) with my conventional wet darkroom on the 1st/Ground floor. The process is involved as I run my print on the upper floor and then stuff the print in a light tight tube and troop it downstairs for developing and fixing. I chose to print this on Ilford MGIV RC 12x16” paper. I have been printing a lot this year on Ilford MG ART 300 12x16 paper. I really like this paper however it is very expensive and being fiber-based takes a long time to fix, wash, and dry. So I took the expedient route. Once I have printed something I like I can translate to the better paper those prints I think hold the most promise. I ran my new darkroom process based off Les McClean’s proce...

This past weekend I had a chance to get out to do some more exploring for my woodland photography. Saturday morning was out as I was recovering from a late Friday night dinner party with the neighbors so Sunday it had to be. In some ways this was unfortunate as Saturday morning dawned with a freezing fog and heavy frost which could have been very nice for photographs. I managed to rise before sunrise and had breakfast before driving the half hour or so to Monk’s Wood. The sky was mostly clear and quite cold, at or near freezing. There was a bank of cloud to the south and so this helped delay the sunrise. My first stop was on the edge of a hill overlooking the fens below. A previous morning and this was a nice scene. Alas this morning it was too clear and much of the atmosphere I had seen before just wasn’t present. So I headed to Monk’s Wood. My plan for the morning was to make a short stop to see if a tree canopy was still present. A few weeks previously I had been on walk with my...

I have revised this since publishing as I got a nice woodland shot back from the lab this week! 2019 turned out not to be a terribly productive for actual photographs taken. I only took 52 photographs it seems. I spent some extra time in the darkroom and I may have to include that work even though some of those photos were not taken in 2019. It is not quite the end of the year and I might do something before now and then to supercede this list but here it is now. As I did last year I try to limit the list down to 6 photos. There are 9 images here but two shown in different forms. I rank these in reverse order with what I think it is the best last. Dead Cedar at Arches National Park  This is a photo I took in 2013 at Arches National Park in Utah in the USA. I really liked this photo and printed it right away. I have come to not like how dark the print was as it hung in my bathroom in the intervening years.  (Many of my older prints suffer from this. In part due to th...

A couple of weeks ago I was getting a little antsy that I hadn't been doing much photography in a while. I had some time to myself and so I set out to Lynwood Arboretum where my wife and I had visited a few weeks earlier. It wasn't a particularly special day for photography, it was a little rainy and broken weather but I felt I needed to do something to keep my skills and habits from getting too rusty. Lynwood Arboretum is on the edge of the Fens in East Anglia. The Fens, which I have to drive through are unremittingly flat. They are reclaimed wetlands with works beginning at the time of Charles II. Using the help of the Dutch, a vast area was eventually drained and reclaimed to be rich farm land. Now my family stock come from Iowa and Illinois in the Midwestern USA but there are areas of the Fens that rival these places in terms of flatness if not scale. On the way to the Arboretum I did stop an take what I hope will be a good representation of this landscape on my Fuji G...

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...

If I am to ever get good at this craft I need to practice. The surprisingly difficult part of this landscape stuff is I have to get up early, before sunrise. This time of year is easier the sun rises about 8:00am compared to 4:30am at the height of summer. So I managed this morning and a short drive to the neighboring town put me on the Ouse. There is not a lot that is spectacular around here, it is flat English countryside. Certainly not the landscapes I knew growing up in Arizona. A chance to learn to adapt. I need to learn to photograph and to see what others (or I) cannot. I loaded up a film holder with Velvia 50 color transparency and one of Ilford FP4+ black and white film the night before. So an exercise in the morning. Weather forecast said clear skies so I could count on some light. So I drive the short distance to town, put on my pack and carry my tripod. I meet a couple of dog walkers with subdued 'good morning's as we probably wish we were really alone at this hou...