More 'Ma': Film from Digital Print

On my pursuit of negative space images, I find these are hard to plan for and one must try and be alive to the idea when they happen. This one I captured on my regular winter walks through town. I was shooting in a black and white mindset with my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera set to a 65:19 aspect ratio. This is my favorite setup to use. Presetting the camera in this way mimics some of my film exploits and lets the mind settle on a certain style by removing choices.

Fixing the aspect ratio forces a compositional dynamic that opens up possibilities for me as much as it forces a constraint. In this case the low cloud and fog between the screen of winter trees and the mountain created this veil of mystery and lets one's mind imagine the whole scene. The screen of trees provide some tonal weight to help ground the image. 

I had this image converted to a 6x7 medium format negative using the services of Gammatech. This allows me to put it in my 4x5 enlarger. I set the condensers for the 80mm lens and setup the easel for a 19" x 7" image on a sheet of 20" x 8" sheet of Ilford MGFB Classic paper cut from a 20" x 16" sheet of the paper. 

It took a few tries to get the image I wanted. I find with soft foggy images that I almost always have to use pure hard (#5) filter in my split filter methodology. (It may be worth considering adding contrast to the image beofre the negative is created.)  I ended up adding more than a stop of burn with the hard filter above the tree line to get the mountainside to balance well tonally. The result however was that the white space took on a gray tone. 

For this print I decided to bleach the whole print knowing these light gray highlights would be bleached first and the dark shadow tones of the trees would be mostly preserved. I carefully performed short bleaching sessions with a wash between each to judge the change in tone. The problem with potassium ferricyanide bleach is the intense yellow color makes it difficult to judge the extent of bleaching. It is often easy to overdo it. 

One print I managed to over-bleach but this one turned out exactly right. If the bleach did not work, I was planning on making another identical print but develop only for 2 minutes instead of the normal three. My Moersch Eco 4812 developer when mixed at 1:10 has the highlights develop last and this gives a chance to snatch it earlier to improve the contrast. 

I ended up with the following which I am pleased with.  

Scan009_stitch f11 1/2
#5 19 sec #5 24 sec burn center tree line up to upper right corner