Holme Fen Water’s Edge Print

On the tail end of the roll of Ilford HP5+ (ISO 800) that the Wye forest print series came from were some photos I used to test my Mamiya 645 Pro mirror fix. One photo of these I liked and so printed it. 

The day was cold windy and sunny. Holme Fen is very subdued in terms of mood in these winter conditions.  However at the edge of a pond I found a simple elegant image. 

In printing this the high contrast creates some challenges. I printed this on Ilford MGFB Classic again. I ran test strips and a test print. This got me close with #00 16 seconds #5 8 seconds. The highlights are fairly blown in the grass on the right and left side of the tree trunks where the sun strikes directly as well as the water in the lower right corner. 

Print 2 #00 16 seconds #5 8 seconds

My mind turns to flashing the paper. I have a strip of the same paper that I ran a flash test strip at 1 seconds intervals on as a reference. I also noted the Ev of the flash light I used at the time. This was Ev 2.6. )My flash light source moves up and down depending on the enlarger head height.) The current setup has the Ev at about 3.0 so slightly brighter. On the test strip it shows 4 seconds should be safe to flash at Ev 2.6 so I chose 3 seconds given the half stop brighter flash light.

Print 3 Flash 3 seconds #00 16 seconds #5 8 seconds 

The flash did the job by bringing up the tone in the highlights. In fact it went a little too far and the print lost some contrast. So perhaps less flash. 

Print 4 (Final) 2 seconds flash #00 16 seconds #5 8 seconds

This is better. It is tempting to even try 1 second flash but I will leave it here.