Photography’s traditional domain was  ”immortalizing” the reality. As students we  joked, as we clicked our film cameras, “let me immortalise you”. We meant on film. Nowadays,  a photo automatically means an instant, digital image.  So that when you talk about film photography,  film cameras, or darkroom prints, you must say exactly that: film photography, as distinct from the omnipresent digital.

My friend Serge,  a great Swiss photographer says that  with the digital everybody nowadays is a photographer. So what does it make him?  He’s not sure.

Looking at tourists devouring London sights with their digital cameras, I see a slightly worrying  aspect to this  ritual.  I suspect we may be losing the ability to take reality in unless it is through seeing it on a screen.  And even though tourists went around with cameras for as long as there were cameras, nowadays the live viewing of one’s surroundings of a tiny screen seems more important than seeing them through one’s own eyes. Isolating it, framing it , slicing reality in order to virtually own it. If you don’t believe me, try this: see if you can turn of the display on your digital camera, then point it and shoot. And don’t review your images until you get home. And preferably not for a few days.

When you finally view them they will still be your photos, but somehow less so. Now, you may ask, why would I want to do that? Why complicate a simple pleasure?

Digital photography is photography, but it is photography by the means of a carpet bombing, leaving in its wake visual destruction…

And having said all that. I have just waved good-bye to my last roll-film camera, a Hasselbald 503CX.  After my Canons, A-1′s and Leica-4 – I was no longer prepared to put in the hours necessary to  develop and print. And if you don’t develop and print, you might as well not bother at all.

Now I am the proud owner of just one, large format, film camera. Ironically – this is even more work than roll film!   Try loading a dozen dark slides. Try transferring the sheets into a developing tank (just six at the time)… So, for the time being  - horror of horrors – I take a lot of iphone snaps.

Stanley Field Revisited #3, originally uploaded by Maciek 1955.

Have you ever been in a location so bleak that you, the photographer were probably the most interesting photographable phenomenon around? That’s what Stanely Field is like.

On top of that, it’s ful of dog shit. Last Sunday I had to wipe dog sheet of my groundglass after it fell off the camera. CAMBO cameras have this annoying feature – a single latch to release the belllows,  or  the film hoder, which tends to fall to the ground without any warninig.

My bad luck continued when that evening I was stupidly outbid for an 8×10 camera for restoration. But then it turned again, when I found an only marginally dodgy CAMBO viewing hood on ebay.

It’s arrived this morning – so bye-bye the dark cloth – I shall not miss you at all! This will also allow me to do some pinhole work, which was nigh impossible squinting my eyes out under the dark cloth.

For what it’s worth – the photo of a traffic cone in Stanley Field is not nearly that dark in reality, dark though it is, it’s just flickr way with pics.  It’s been taken at 80 ISO – which I now realise is also my wordpress nick.

Off to Stonehenge with a nephew, I brought the Hassy along with a couple of NC160′s and some TMAX. Unfortunately, a roll of TMAX was most likely wasted in my second best magazine which tends to let you shoot with the darkslide still in! Aaaargh! I’ve shot half a dozen photos of a Chinook and one of an Apache over the neolithic site, before I realised the darkslide has been in for most of the frames. For how many, I still didn’t have the guts to find out. I’ve reloded some TMAX and managed to get at least a couple shots more. This time the Chinnok was higher, but a person walked in between the stones, providing a silhouette without which this picture would make much less sense.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!