Sean Esopenko

Night Time Photography – Delacour

December 12, 2010

For a while I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at some night photography.  The sun goes down pretty early this time of year and I’ve figured it would be a great way to squeeze in some extra images each week.  I went for a walk from the acreage with my “new” Mamiya RB67 Pro-S and the 90mm lens.  I didn’t use the prism finder this time because I find it too dark.  The expired Agfa 400 film seems to be holding out pretty good.  I’m starting to understand what it can do and but I only have one roll left.  This time I developed it in D76 for 16 minutes to get a lot of extra contrast to the image.  When pixel peeping the scan the noise looks a little ugly in the shadow areas.  Hopefully this weekend I’ll have a chance to make actual silver prints and see if the noise looks better in a wet photography process compared to the digital.

Like always, I zoom in at 100% and nuke all the dust with the clone & healing tools.  The roll film shots have way less dust in them than the 4×5 due to the fact you don’t have to worry about dust getting in a film holder while loading it.  As it stands, I lose about 30% of my “good” large format images to dust.  I can nuke it in the computer but in the darkroom it’s a different story.

For this image, I was cloning out the dust when I thought “where’d all these scratches come from?”  I saw small scratches going across the negative and after I removed about half of them I realized they’re star trails!  Since the exposure was 1-2 minutes the stars were given enough time to move in the sky!  I know for next time, in case I make a shot with a lot of night sky in it and it’s pointed at a very starry portion of the sky.

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