MorseBlog

My odyssey in film photography these past short 8 years has taught me a few things about my preferences for cameras. Affordability has always been a factor. I also have a distinct prejudice in favor of medium format. This stems from first my brother’s involvement where he left a distinctly favorable impression on medium format despite having shot 35mm and large format competently as well. He passed away well before the digital era. I also decided that I wanted to avoid 35mm despite the obvious advantages in terms of cost, size and weight. I reasoned the advantages of film over digital was being quickly overtaken and medium format would remain relevant for a while longer. As I write this however it seems the technical advantages of film have been mostly if not completely over-run by advances in digital technology and cost. Never-the-less there are some attendant benefits to shooting film; among are not economy, simplicity, nor instant gratification. So my first film camera tha...

On our first day we headed to the north side of the park looking for a hike. We didn't find the one we were looking for but found Alcoholic Pass. We remembered this from 4 years previously as someone had said there was a NEw year's Day hike which was a local tradition for some. It is a short but steep hike into the small range of mountains on the north side of the park. The views are expansive of the Borrego Springs Valley. Here are a few colour photos I took. Some of the ocotillo were in bloom A desert still life like those mentioned in Torote Canyon post Across Coyote canyon to the mountains above Borrego Springs Ocotillo Beavertail cactus desert still life Down the Trail: Looking north from the top of the pass to Rabbit Mountain.

Our last day in Anza Borrego we selected a hike to Torote Canyon. Now Torote is the Spanish for Elephant tree. We like elephant trees. They are odd trees that grow only in specific places in the park. Four years ago we hiked up to them and we wanted to see if we could find some more.  Torote canyon runs out to a broad flat plain. It is a sandy drive up to where we started the hike. Much of the hike was on the dirt road as we did not have a 4WD to get us further up the canyon. Nevermind it was a pleasant walk with hardly any people about.  The day was not particularly hot but it was warm. I found myself 'blacking dogging'* it in the shadow of the canyon however to stay comfortable.Throughout the day I felt hot and tired and worried there was something wrong. It transpired that I had picked up some food poisoning from the night before and my condition got much worse over the next 24 hours. Never-the-less the area was beautiful and we had nice day out though we cut o...

Every few years when we visit friends and family over Christmas in southern California we stay a few days in Borrego Springs. Borrego Springs is a small resort community in the middle of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park. The first time I took my wife here she was shocked at how bleak and desolate it is. It is very desolate and dry. In winter however the weather is perfect for hiking. After some time she began to see the subtleties of the desert and now we both enjoy visiting and walking in the park. My grandmother first introduced me to the desert. She lived north of Phoenix in the Sonoran desert and she had a great love for it. They lived on about 5 acres in a house with great big windows that brought the desert landscape into the house. My grandfather built a pond and waterfall that attracted wildlife from all over the desert. In addition to the rabbits, coyotes, mule deer, mountain lions, rattle snakes, and gila monsters my grandmother taught me the names of different cactus...

I have been steadily modifying my Meopta enlarger that I bought for £15.00. I started with raising it up to allow larger prints. Then I upgraded the lenses as I saw I was losing sharpness on the edges. Then because I wanted to stop down the lens for better sharpness I changed my 75 watt bulb to 150 watt. More light helped immensely with exposure times with stopped down large prints. On the other hand  smaller prints suddenly became challenging as I could not stop the lens down enough and I kept running into sub-8-second exposures even at f22. Though I have automated my enlarger  and that makes the short exposures accurate, there is not much time for dodging and burning. Finally I decided I could improve the setup using the now unused filter drawer. Since my automation project uses below-the-lens filters the filter drawer is unused. I bought a pair of single stop ND filters (Cokin P Series P152 0.3 ND2 - 1 Stop Neutral Density Filter) and carefully cut them to fit the fil...

I joined the original Kickstarter Campaign for Ferrania . The journey has been long waiting for the rewards. I joined as a means to support any effort for film photography. Thus I am happy to be asked to buy their interim product; a black and white 35mm film based on the formula for Ferrania's historical P30 movie film.  This was meant to to be a pipe cleaning exercise for the resurrected factory. I am not a big fan of 35mm and prefer medium format. The original rewards were to be color reversal film in different formats including medium format. About a month ago I finally got my film and today got around to processing it. I decided to follow the process outlined in my previous post here . I made a roll of test exposures on my Olympus OM1 metered separately with a digital light meter (Sekonic) at ASA 80 box speed. I exposed +/-1 and +/- 2 stops and nominal tests. I developed in D76 stock at 7:00 minutes 20 degrees (compensated for 24 degree developer temperature) according to the...

In previous posts I explored using expired 4x5 film emulsion as a basis for making salt prints. I reasoned that if better results were had with sized paper then it should be possible to use expired film as 'sized plastic'. This worked though it is difficult to achieve consistent results. I then extended this to expired photographic plates and achieved some success there. The next 'frontier' is to apply the same techniques to expired paper. Preparing the Paper Again I took a few full sheets of ORWO black and white paper and fixed it for 5 minutes in rapid fixer.  Then I washed for 10 minutes as one would a developed print. The point of all this is to remove all the silver from the emulsion. I then dried the paper thoroughly. Salting the Paper Next I immersed the paper in salt solution for about 10 minutes. Previous work with film found that insufficient time in the salt solution levels the result insensitive as the salt has not fully been absorbed into the gelat...