Sean Esopenko

Rolling Through Cement

April 17, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve gone out shooting photographs.  Part of it has been due to the weather and part of it has been due to the weather.  It’s hard to be motivated when the sky is constantly grey and dark and we had a fairly cold winter.  The cold weather means I can’t use the darkroom since the outbuilding doesn’t have much of a heater.  When it’s -20 Celcius the propane heater can only bring the darkroom to about 60F which is nowhere near warm enough to work efficiently.  Plus I’ve had some difficulties producing large prints.  The darkroom is powered by 3-4 outdoor extension cables connected together.  The light bulb is pretty dim on the enlarger, making it tough to expose paper at narrow F-Stops.  I have to use 3-4 minute exposures at even F5.6 which introduces other problems.

So this weekend I’m going to print an edition of 11×14′s.  This is the image I’m going to try to squeeze an edition out of.  I also will be printing an edition of 20×24′s of a negative I have of The King Eddy.  It should be 8-10 Celcius this weekend meaning an edition of large prints shouldn’t be too troublesome.

This was shot in Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed one stop with DDX 1+4.  It’s scanned on my Epson V700.  I’m trying to squeeze out as much detail as I can from this scanner.  People on various forums claim you can’t squeeze any more detail out of this scanner than 2400dpi but I’ve found that when I scan at 6400 dpi and downsample to 2400 dpi the difference is VERY noticeable compared to a straight 2400 dpi scan.  It’s 1600 pixels wide and demonstrates the detail that can be captured from medium format film.  It’s juicy ;).

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