MorseBlog

This past October my wife and I visited the Yorkshire Dales as outlined in this post . I have  finally gotten around to making some prints in the darkroom from this trip. This is Force Gill on Whernside the highest point in Yorkshire. It was taken with my Fuji GSW 690 6x9 medium format rangefinder camera on Ilford FP4+, developed with HC-110 dilution B single shot. I was a bit lazy however and decided to print it in my downstairs darkroom (I know how luxurious it sounds to have two darkrooms!) which means my Meopta 6x6 enlarger. The Beast upstairs can handle the 6x9 negative but it is a bit limited in that it has no wet-side and I must haul my exposed paper downstairs in a light-tight tube to develop the prints. (See not really luxurious at all!)  So I opted to crop 6x6 out of 6x9 and this changes the image markedly. Below is the original image from the scanned negative. As I noted before in my best of 2018 post,  I liked this wide angle shot as it makes the wate...

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...

A couple of weeks ago he wife and I went back to the Yorkshire Dales for a spur-of-the-moment weekend visit. Personally this one of my favorite parks in the UK. We stayed at Low Gingerfield B&B and I can recommend it as a comfortable and friendly place to stay. I took along my Fuji 690 GSW and Fuji G617 cameras. The Fuji 690 is a 6x9cm negative behind a 65mm lens, the Fuji G617 is a 6x17cm negative behind a 105mm lens. They both give wonderful expressions of this landscape but speak with distinctive voices. The 617 gives voice to a wide view through the extreme width of the negative. The lens itself is almost a short telephoto given an 80mm is a ‘normal’ lens on a 6x6 negative. The 690 however has a reasonably wide negative but a substantially wide angle lens. The 617 gathers in the wide open countryside but also hungers for the foreground. The first photo below I feel really conveys the mood and scene as I remember it for all the of the distant parts. It is somewhat let dow...