MorseBlog

Day 1 Well the forecast said fog and so I set the alarm. Mollie got up early with me and we gathered the Intrepid and jumped in the car for the drive down to Holme Fen. It was a little depressing driving to Holme Fen in the pre-dawn light. There were thin patches of fog on parts of the road and a thin haze generally but not what I would call proper fog. Still, I said to Mollie, a good day to be out and Holme Fen is her favorite woodland.  We arrived and parked up and I assembled the camera with 150mm lens and put it on the tripod. This is my usual routine of having it mostly setup and slung over my should as it makes it easy to decide to compose and make an image without unpacking everything. I packed a mish mash of different film including HP5+ B&W, Portra 160, Ektar, and Velvia 50 for color. Today would be about trying to shoot a little softer f-stop and concentrate on 'ma'.  We headed out and I have to say it was a lovely morning but in the ascending pre-dawn light I wa...

I took Mollie to Holme Fen again this last week. She enjoys these woods especially much and I go there now for her preference as much as mine. She sprints down the trails and takes in the heady scents of this moist woodland. It seems to bring her more energy.  We were following some fainter trails grown over in some areas with now-brown bracken. She is a short rather sausagy terrier mix so her short legs present a challenge in thick undergrowth. She adapts however and tunnels under where she can but has also innovated a spy-hop where she jumps over the bracken. She leaps over a section with her body nearly vertical and this raises her head and she surveys where to jump next. In this way she can follow the trails deer have left with a series of these spy-hops. As her confidence has grown she enjoys jumping on the springy matted bracken as she romps about the forest.  We carried on down one of these trails for a while not really finding anything photographic. I had my Intrepid 4...

Part I I have been looking for new forests recently that are close but different from the ones I have ben visiting regularly for the last couple fo years. My wife ad I took Mollie to Thetford forest and I amongst the plantation pines there are some more wild beech forests. So a couple of weeks ago Mollie and I got up early and we headed to an area near Two Mile Bottom.  We trekked through pine forest and along forest roads and stumbled upon an area of beech forest with its clean vegetation-free floor littered with beech nuts. The leaves were still quite green on most trees as this has been a warm fall with no frosts. The grass on the walk up held heavy drops of due and my boots were soon soaked through. Wind whipped in gusts through the tree tops. Coming upon this beech forest next to a farmer's field we could see and hear the early potato harvesting activity. I setup the Intrepid with a 150mm lens. The sky was mostly cloudy so it was appropriate to use some chrome film (Fuji Astia...

After a lull in my photo taking I have decided to explore the idea of intimate landscape using a panoramic camera. I have a few possibilities in my camera stable. The smallest is the Fuji GSW 690 which gives me a 65mm lens on a 6x9 negative. I also have 6x12 filmback for my Intrepid 4x5 camera which I can coupled with my 90, 150, and 240mmm lenses. Finally the widest is the Fuji G617 which gives a 6x17 negative couple with a 105mm lens.  I made this overlay to show the difference between the G617 and the GSW 690 that while the GSW has a much wider lens 65mm vs 105mm the G617 still wins in terms of wideness.  6x17 (Portra 400) vs 6x9 (Portra 160) formats. (same tripod location) Moon moved due to different times when photo was taken. The challenges with the G617 are many. First it has a center filter to reduce vignetting due to the wide angle. This removes about 1 stop (2x darker as marked on lens). This means ISO 100 film needs to be metered at ISO 50 for instance.  Next...

In my introduction post on the culmination of a local woodlands photo project I gave an overview of the process and linked to a video review of the Blurb Publishing version of the book. Now I have my Lulu version so I can compare the two results. First a summary of the major differences.  Attribute                  Blurb                                                            Lulu Size                              13"x11" (330 x 280 mm)                    8.3" × 11.7" (210 × 297 mm) Cover                        Imagewrap Hardcover      ...

Apparently I haven't been in the darkroom since September last year! This is of course when I began to prepare for the fall season of photography. During the fall I probably took in excess of 100 photos most of which were on my large format camera. This has been an incredibly productive in terms of number and quality of my work. It has been helped by having a focus on a subject (woodland photography).  Unfortunately my darkroom work has taken a back seat to fall photographs that went through a long productive period over the summer. I took to making smaller prints with wide margins and even went so far as to fashion simple frames to display them.  Expired Developer and Concentrate This week I returned (slowly at first) to the darkroom and reacquainted myself with that aspect of my work. I had a modest backlog of black and white images from this past summer I had not printed yet. I had the inevitable problems of assessing equipment and chemicals. While I had just mixed a ...