MorseBlog

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...

My odyssey in film photography these past short 8 years has taught me a few things about my preferences for cameras. Affordability has always been a factor. I also have a distinct prejudice in favor of medium format. This stems from first my brother’s involvement where he left a distinctly favorable impression on medium format despite having shot 35mm and large format competently as well. He passed away well before the digital era. I also decided that I wanted to avoid 35mm despite the obvious advantages in terms of cost, size and weight. I reasoned the advantages of film over digital was being quickly overtaken and medium format would remain relevant for a while longer. As I write this however it seems the technical advantages of film have been mostly if not completely over-run by advances in digital technology and cost. Never-the-less there are some attendant benefits to shooting film; among are not economy, simplicity, nor instant gratification. So my first film camera tha...

I recently bought some cheap unopened Orwo photo paper. Readers (I know not many) of this blog will note a number of entries dedicated to attempting to use old paper. I am sure many find this a waste of time and money, which it probably is, but I learned a bit of history of photography along the way and maybe something of techniques. Some results have been quite good while others a complete failure. Sometimes I can rescue papers using different developers. Orwo was an East German brand of paper which was part of a breakup of the original company after WWII. The paper is graded double weight Fiber with a smooth (not gloss) surface and 'normal' contrast.  I ran an initial test strip, and it didn't look favorable. f8 Test strip This allowed me to run a full-size print at 8 seconds. This confirmed my suspicions. The paper had extremely limited contrast. This was probably less than the original normal contrast and most likely due to the age of the paper. f8 at 8 sec Un...