MorseBlog

I ventured out today with Mollie after a hectic week of drinking, eating, and celebrating with friends and family over the holidays. It was all very enjoyable but I think both of us needed to get out in the woods for a while. For her part Mollie had a great time in Holme Fen. It rained so hard this morning when we got up she declined our daily morning walk and so by noon was ready for a romp. She quickly got up to her old tricks of jumping, spyhopping, exploring and chasing about the bracken and fallen logs.   Blog Post Cover Image For me this was more about some experimentation which I will get to shortly. The day was not really made for photography and the light incredibly variable with almost clear skies when we arrived to overcast to some clearing and intermittent clouds during the 3 hours or so we were out.  I wanted to have a good demonstration of what box speed on a film means and how this may not always be the best way to shoot film. This came up as a question on ...

This is another in my series of hunting for a good developer/exposure regime for HP5+ film on my 4x5. I am taking a more subjective and less sensitometry-based approach to this film. I started here . (For FP4+ I took the sensitometry route in an earlier blog post here .) I aimed to take two images of the same subject under similar lighting. The subject is a hide on the edge of Holme Fen overlooking Trundle Mere, a small pond. I took an image at my new provisional EI of 200 metering to place the shadows in zone III. I then took an image at box speed EI 400 with the same objective. The EI 200 images I made with f22 while the EI 400 were at f32 with the same shutter speed. (Blog page cover image) I developed the image exposed at EI 200 in HC-110 dilution H at 8 minutes at 21C (this is -20% of the recommended nominal time of 10 minutes) Previously I had tried an image at 7 minutes (-30%) at EI 200 so I was trying a slightly longer development.  EI 200 Developed 8 minutes HC-110 dilutio...

I decided to break out the Moersch MT 4 Sepia toning solution and give it a try. I am usually not a fan of warm tone prints or sepia toned prints. It is a just a matter of personal taste but it is always worth exploring things outside of your own creative sphere. (This is the smelly form using sulfur (or sulphur if your are from the UK.) Moersch MT 4 Sepia Toner I read through the documents on the Moersh Photochemie website .  The sulfur/sepia toning documents are here (NSFW images) . Like most of Wolfgang's documents I find them poetically confusing. Whether this is because English is a second language or just a style I find it frustrating and entrancing at the same time.  The article is really part of an overall discussion on toning and bleaching with the linked section focused on sulfur toning.  Here are some things I gathered to aid in understa...

Introduction In other posts I have documented my use of Cibachrome drums which are designed to develop 8x10 sheets of Cibachrome color print paper. Cibachrome has not been made since 2009 so these come up often. I also found the motor unit that rotates the drum. Cibachrome Drum  Drum with Motor Unit I originally bought this to develop Cibachrome from expired paper and chemicals ( See link here. ).  Eventually I made us of it to develop 8x10 film as a cheap developing tank. For 8x10 you roll the film up emulsion facing inside so that it lines the inside of the drum. This is done of course in complete darkness. The lid is then screwed on and after that the rest of the operations can happen in normal room light. The lid has a small reservoir that holds about 250 ml of chemistry. You fill the reservoir with the developer while the drum is upright. The the drum is laid on its side and rotated. (I would roll it along the kitchen countertop until I got the motor unit.) ...