Mum and Dad
Ultimately, photography is about who you are.
These are the photos and my mother and father, who’d lived separately for over 30 years now.
This is the only place where I show these.
Roe End Lane #1
Shot a dozen paper negatives in a lane near Luton. It was very cold, but very sunny with a lot of dramatic contrast between shadow and light.
As usual, a few papers got mangled in the dark slides and a few seriously over/under exposed, but the ease of loading/developing paper negs as compared with film makes it all worthwhile. Somehow a wasted paper negative is not as frustrating as a wasted sheet of large format film. And when it works, it’s as beautiful.
More large format adventures in the dark
At long last I’ve put my improvised darkroom together again to make some large format prints with my large format camera as the enlarger (read here how this idea came about) .
I’ve been using a cheap variable contrast paper (Sliverprint Proof) and was keen to increase contrast a bit. The only thing to hand with which I use as a filter, was a strip sample Lee magenta gel.
Magenta filter increases contrast and there is a range of three of four in a proper filter pack – lighter shades for less and darker for more contrast. I didn’t have a clue where in the range did my bit of filter come.
A ropey looking setup - but the results were great
The prints were pleasantly contrastier than without the filter and their sharpness didn’t suffer at all. Half of my time is usually wasted on hopeless experiments, but this time I was lucky.
Don’t give up the day job, Ansell
Not quite Ansell Adams
After a forced break of about a month, after my scooter fall, I was back outdoors with my large format camera. The day was lovely with a low winter sun. I had the luxury of eight double film loaders available to me, albeit loaded with photographic paper – as I’m not yet ambidextrous enough to handle sheet film.
I’ve now been shooting large format for ten months – I still have a lot to learn and paper is a good learning medium, easy to load and develop under red light, and offering fair results for a fraction of the cost of film. Obviously, what you get is a paper negative. This needs scanning and inverting with software such as Photoshop.
A risk with paper, as with any shortcut you might take with large format photography, is that shortcuts in general go against the nature of the medium: you risk going faster than you ought to and the results suffer. That’s in the nutshell the story of my last outing. Working my way though a box-full of film loaders, I’ve definitely shot many more frames than I should have had in two hours or so, namely 16, where with film I would have shot no more than perhaps six.
On the other hand, I had the first opportunity to try our my new Cokin neutral grad filter with both the wide 100 mm and the standard 210 mm lenses.
Cokin neutral grad filter on a wide lens via a 49 mm adapter ring
If you like to work at snail’s pace – Cokin filter holder used with the 49 mm adapter ring and the recessed wide lens board, is just the thing! To view: screw the adapter ring in, snap on the holder, slide in the filter. View. To adjust shutter, aperture: slide out the filter, snap off the holder, unscrew the adapter ring and hey presto! There is no way you could access the controls with the filter on. Or is there? As I found out, as long as the settings you’re looking for are: fully opened, fully closed – you can just about stick a finger under the assembly and operate the camera with the filter on.
And finally, how do you get around with your large format camera? If you use a field camera, things ought to be fairly simple, though even with a field camera folding into a neat box, you will still need your tripod, your film holders etc.
If, like me, you use a technical, or a view camera in the field, then you’re pretty much reduced to carrying around a large case. Alternatively, you can take a lead from grannies in your local high street, zooming around with handy shopping trolleys. That’s what I did. You will still need some boxes inside, but getting around is dead easy.
Shopping trolley in the service of large format photography
One-handed photography
November #1, originally uploaded by Maciek 1955.
Right hand in a sling, following a dislocated shoulder, following a fall from my scooter, I finally, though not painlessly, managed to take and process a photograph.
Under the circumstances, I opted for large format and a paper negative – it’s much easier to develop a paper negative under red safe-light, than to load film into a tank using just one hand.
Landscapes, here I come!
The Beast - a Hassy with the Cokin P499 Universal Ring attached
I have been told – and now I’ve learnt it for myself – that in every photographer’s life there comes a moment when life seems unbearable without filters.
For digital that was never a problem, all my digital files are RAW and 9/10 are treated with a degree of HDR processing, resulting in pleasingly darkened skies.
With the analogue landscape work it’s a different story, unless you bracket your scans (deliberately under and over exposing multiple versions) and use HDR techniques on the files. Or use the fun shortcut of taking bracketed digital close-ups of your negatives (better still, transparencies) and treat those with an HDR process. That way you can – for example – darken the skies, the most common issue in landscape photography.
But, if’ – like me - you’re one of these individuals who enjoy time-travel backwards – in my case to the darkroom – you’d want to go to the darkroom with a negative that is already balanced and not requiring too much dodging and burning.
So, what about putting an actual piece of glass in front of all your other glass in the field? For some time I’ve been sorely tempted to do that and particularly to use a neutral grad filter to cool off the skies.
And now I can, though getting here was – as always – a guilt-ridden process of budgeting, research and taking chances: no matter how deliberate and well researched your gear choices, when you make the actual purchase there will always be something you haven’t found out about from the internet.
My choice was determined (apart from the severely limited budget) by the cameras I own. I needed a filter holder which would suit my Hasselblad and my large format CAMBO, and possibly a 35mm, not to mention a digital compact.
With just a bit of trial and error, I opted for a very reasonably priced Cokin system with a universal ring screw-on-able onto any lens up to 82 mm in diameter (all of mine fit into that category, including the large format). With just one lens, my wide Rodenstock 100mm, large format, I needed to buy an additional screw on 49mm adapter ring, as the universal ring would not fit into the recessed lens board in which the wide lens sits.
I was particularly gratified that despite of what Cokin literature said, my medium an large format did not require the more expensive Z, or X systems.
And doesn’t the assembly look the business?
Now for some photography!
Kentish Town #3
When all else fails and there’s absolutely no time for photography, I take candid photos on my way to work. The shooting is blind and instant, so I spend more time processing.
shooting myself in the foot with infra-red
A forray into the infra-red spectrum
Technical proficiency is hard to achieve when you’re like me, never passing an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot, never sticking with and building on what you know, forever experimenting.
It was an infrared film experiment this time. The Rollei/EFKE 820 IR (120) to be exact. The nearest thing to hand, similar to a Wratten 82 type filter necessary for IR photography was a red Hoya 25A filter . Look it up on the web and you’ll see that “it is not suitable for IR photography”. Not that web based advice has ever stopped me from, you guessed it: shooting myself in the foot.
With a Wratten 82 type, deep red filter the EFKE 820 IR film rates somewhere between 3 and 12 ISO. With the Hoya, I guessed – and I wasn’t too far off the mark – at about 50ISO.
Not too bad on a sunny day, but while I was guessing, the weather decided to turn and this particular Saturday morning was dark and damp. Furthermore, my only Hasselblad lens capable of taking my only red filer was a 150mm Sonnar with the biggest aperture of f4. A simple equation, really: whatever I was going to shoot had to be off a tripod.
In the end just three or four out of twelve frames were more or less properly exposed. Developed in Rodinal (1:25) for close to 10 minutes, the greens produced a funny, glowing otherworldly effect, just as the websites said they would, but nothing to write home about. In conclusion: it is perfectly possible to shoot infrared film with a Hoya 25A red filter, but the effects might look half-baked and be mistaken for poor processing.
Still, it was fun to find out for myself.
another year, another website
My simplest online portfolio yet, with very little Flash and a capacity for a total of about 50 images. The address, as before http://www.bernatt.com
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