Today I developed my own b&w 4×5 for the first time. I had a couple sheets processed by a lab when I was in Hawaii (where I bought the camera). They were pretty grainy after I scanned them in but I shrugged it off to the fact the film was ISO 400. I just finished scanning in some shots on the same ilford 400 film I used before but developed myself. Wow! Just wow! The lab must have been using some super high contrast development process because I fell in love instantly with the hand processed negatives.
The grain was almost non-existant at 1200 dpi. I upped scanner to 2400 to finally see some grain. And the tonal values! This jpeg doesn’t serve it justice, the tonal values are amazing! I can zoom right in at 100% and see this:
See that resolution? 10092 x 7045. That’s 71 megapixels! It makes me wonder what kind of image I’d have shooting iso 100 or iso 50 film!
I’ve scanned some more 6×9′s and a fiew more 4×5′s from the Honolulu honeymoon. Here’s a view from our 12th floor hotel room of the golf course across the canal in Waikiki, Hawaii. This is a 6×9 crop that measures 4984×5577 pixels, or around 28 megapixels. I think 2400 dpi is the maximum resolution I can scan Kodak 160 colour negative film at. Beyond that and I’m limited by film grain.
Here’s a famous view of Honolulu from the top of Diamon Head mountain. I hiked up the mountain with about 45 pounds of camera gear and it was worth it. The view of the city below was spectacular! It’s a 1200 dpi scan of a 4×5 negative, taken with Ilford ISO 400 B&W negative film. I think 1200 dpi is the maximum resolution I can scan this high-grain film at but it still yields a 8444×10629 image, or about 89 megapixels. Not only is the film grain critical for sharp images but the photographic technique is important too. This image’s sharpness turned out good because I properly utilized lens tilt to bring the entire ground plane in focus from front to back. I have other 4×5 images where I didn’t do this and the sharpness is mediocre, despite stopping down the image to F45. This image was shot at about F22 which prevents diffraction from ruining the sharpness, too.
Here’s a 100% pixel-peep with an illustration at the top left demonstrating the resolution capable with large format film. It’s cropped down to a very tiny area of the image and the detail is astounding. I need to get myself a good focusing loupe, similar to a jeweler’s magnifier. My own eyes can’t see the ground glass clear enough to make a good decision on focus adjustments and a loupe will give me better consistency in image sharpness.
So the technical field camera’s been great, not only for the resolution capabilities of 4×5 film, but also for the creative capabilities of extra lens adjustments. Spending 10 minutes preparing for one photograph really forces me to concentrate on my subject, composition and technique. It’s great!
It has been about 3 weeks since the last blog post because Luba and I were just married. (Surprise!) We got back from our honeymoon in Oahu, Hawaii a couple days ago. We enjoyed the trip, overall. Honolulu is busy and dirty. The north shore is beautiful and serene. I took the opportunity to purchase a large format camera at a great price while I was there. I bought an older model Wista 45 with rear tilt movements on the horizontal axis, bed drop, front rise and front tilt on the vertical axis. It came with a Fujinon 180mm F5.6 lens. The lens’s markings are on the outer region of the lens barrel, placing it after 1978, meaning it’s multi-coated.
I also got a matching roll back for it but the roll back has a light leek; the 6×9 images have to be cropped to about a 4×5 aspect ratio until I fix the leak. It was all had for about $530 USD. The lens looks like it was dropped at one point with a dent in the metal surrounding the rear element but there’s no hazing, no scratches and the shutter is bang on. Oh and they had new “odd-ball sized” filters in a bin for $5 each. The 180mm lens’s barrel was an “odd-ball” size… Cha-ching!
Rainbow Photo & Video in Honolulu processes B&W 4×5 so I got some sheets done by them along with a couple rolls of 120mm film. I waited until I got home to get the velvia processed because the costs in Hawaii were too high (more than double). The airport security was a bit of a stress because they were all so inconsistent on whether they were going to x-ray my film or not. All in all my film was x-rayed about 4 times which hopefully won’t make a huge difference. The iso 400 black and white wasn’t affected, it appears, so hopefully the costly velvia wasn’t.
This is an image shot from my balcony with the roll-film back. It’s Kodak iso 160 film that was cropped down to hide the light leak from the holder. I tried for the “fake miniature” look but I think I used too narrow an aperture. I shot it at about F22 when I should have used around F12 or so.
I like the colour and the resolution is amazing. A sharp scan at about 3200 dpi gives the equivelent of a 48 megapixel image before cropping out the light leak. It was scanned on an epson V700. I have a few black and white sheets to work on more however my scanning technique needs to be improved. I still have to nail down dust management because Digital ICE (automatic removal of dust & scratches) doesn’t work for black and white film. It has to do with infra-red light not being able to pass through the silver of the black and white negatives.
I was going through my collection of filters, digging out coloured and UV filters in preparation for my jump to film photography, and came across a Rodenstock Light Red #25 filter. I had never seriously used it back in my photography classes so I wanted to see what it does to a landscape. I grabbed my Canon 5D and an incident light meter and quickly headed outside for a little “assignment”.
The guide that came with the filter recommends an exposure increase of 3 stops for this filter. I needed a “control” shot so I took one photograph without the filter using the recommended settings from my incident meter for F13. I then screwed on the red filter and shot one frame with the exact same settings. I applied the 3 stop increase to exposure, as recommended by the pamphlet included with the filter. All three shots were taken with a graduated ND filter in place to keep the sky under control.
Finally I headed into the house, imported the photos into Lightroom, and applied a greyscale development setting. I immediately saw a contrast difference with the filter but it was obviously due to the darker exposure. The 3 stop increase with the filter lost all the tonal detail in the sky. I “cheated” and used Lightroom to apply a 1 stop increase to the metered exposure with the red filter. This gave an image similar in luminance to the control photograph but I immediately saw the difference in the contrast between the two.
Theoretically, whichever colour filter you apply, you will darken it’s complementing colours. The red filter is meant to bring extra “pump” to the blue and green end of the colour wheel. This increases the overall contrast of the outdoor landscape, usually dominated by blues and greens. It was a good exercise to perform and I thought I should share my results. I will now have a better idea of what the filter will do when I start shooting large format (hopefully in the next week) and there is less of a chance of an unexpected surprise in the darkroom.
We’ve had thunderstorm after thunderstorm here in Calgary. The cloud formations have been mostly aesthetic, despite the clear blue sky yesterday. Today I took advantage of the clouds to see the effect of a red #25 filter on black and white photography. This is a digital image taken with the filter.
I was mostly concerned with how to read the meter with the filter on. I have to meter for a fairly dark exposure or else all the cloud detail is completely lost. The green foliage in the lower region is darkened dramatically. I used a graduated ND filter in combination because the lower half was just too dark for a good photograph.
I tweaked this image in photoshop a lot more than I usually work my images. I’ve figured out that using multiple layers is a form of “lossless” editing. I will select a region, copy it, and paste it into an overlaying layer. If I don’t like my manipulations on this region of the photograph, I delete the layer. The same can also be done with darkening/lightening layers for dodging/burning. I’ve favored this method because then I get pressure sensitivity with my old Wacom tablet. Adobe Lightroom doesn’t seem to give me pressure control when applying brush work. I like to be able to finely control my opacity mid stroke.
Finally I brought it back into lightroom where I applied an extremely subtle split tone. I used a cool blue for the hi-lights and a sepia tone for the darks. I set each to about 5% saturation so it’s barely noticeable. I applied a more “4x5ish” aspect ratio, in preparation for the “feal” for the ratio when I begin my foray into large format photography. I then pumped the lights and hilights up a bit to give the overall image a little more punch when viewed about a half a room back.
In the end I wish more sunbeams poked through the clouds and that the lawn mower tracks on the ground were a little more fresh. Overall I’m somewhat pleased with the image but I want to do better.
Putting this darkroom together has caused me to be a little too busy to actually take photographs. I’ve been lately confined to the subject matter of the acreage or the drive home but tonight there was something quite fascinating to take pictures of. Actually, I always find the clouds right after a rain storm to be fascinating.
This Zeiss 35mm F2 Distagon is probably my favorite lens I’ve ever owned. I have a feeling that my next lens for 35mm SLR/DSLR will be another Zeiss. It records colour and contrast excellently and the micro-contrast lends itself very well to landscapes. The grass in this photograph was exquisitely defined through the Zeiss glass. Handling the lens is just amazing too, after using it for about 2 months. Manual focus is an after thought for Canon lenses, even in the L series. Shooting for infinite, like in this photograph, is stupidly simple. Just throw it to infinity and you’ll know you’re in focus.
Last night, at about 11pm, I finished building the light baffle for the “darkshack’s” ventilation system. Here you can see its half-finished state with a baffle directly under the fan output. I built a second baffle to the right on the bottom then flacked it with black spray paint before covering it up. Since the shack’s in rough shape, I was going for cheap and functional, not pretty and slick. I’ll be covering it with left-over scrap shingles from the roof job last weekend.
The recommended airflow for a darkroom is a 10x turnover rate. You can compute this by measuring length, height and width of the space, giving you a volume in cubic feet, then dividing by 6, to give you the cubic-feet-per-minute (cfm) required for a 10x turnover. The space required about 90cfm so I chose a 350 cfm shop fan and installed it over the sink area. It sucks air out of the shack so it will work well in controlling fumes coming from the wet process area. In order to relieve some forward-pressure on the shop fan I installed an input vent with tin ducting for light baffle. This will have a furnace filter on the end of it, keeping dust out of the darkroom. I chose a largely over-sized fan and I’m glad I did. When the door to the shack is open the air output from the fan is very strong. However, once the door’s closed it’s greatly reduced. I’m estimating I’m still getting at least 100cfm of air exchange, however.
Installing the fan’s frame in the window and cutting the surrounding wood for the interior was about an hour’s job and I finished that a couple days ago. The light baffle took about four hours to build all together, with the later stage of it a little rushed since it was quite dark at 11pm. There’s not a whole lot of work required on the shack, itself, now.
The logistics of water supply and the finicky job of fixing light leaks are the last tasks to complete. For the water I will probably build a rack that will hold a bucket with a gasket/pipe adapter drilled into its bottom. The same rack will have a holder closer to the floor that I can set the bucket on for filling without having to remove all the plumbing from it. I plan on hauling the water to the shack using 5 gallon pails with lids, loading 2-3 at a time on a 2-wheel dolly for transport from the house to the shack. Beyond gathering the plumbing parts and the task of cementing the piping, it shouldn’t be too difficult.
The light leaks will be tough around the door area because there isn’t a lot of space to build a second door, and frankly, I’d rather not go through the bother. I’m considering building a snap-on curtain system over the door made out of light-proof fabric, available on special order at most fabric stores. The vast majority of the light leaks will be solved with the ventilation system’s baffle but tonight I’ll be spending some time in the shack determining exactly where all the light leaks are happening.
Throughout the entire day storm clouds have been threatening us. With the help of a friend I finished shingling the soon-to-be wet photo studio. I’ve had ideas galore swimming through my head as to what I’m going to attempt when it’s ready. Here’s a shot of the rain clouds that have been slowly surrounding us. We keep hearing thunder and every 30 minutes we’re battered with heavy rain but it hasn’t developed into a real storm system yet. Beware, this is an 800kb jpeg.
All my free time has been spent setting up a darkroom in an old shack on the acreage. My fiance’s father has used it for everything from slaughtering animals to hanging meat to storing power tools. I spent many hours washing the walls, vacuming up the cob-webs and repainting the interior. Today I ripped all the scrap sheet metal off the roof, revealing two large holes in the ceiling. These holes were leaking water into the shack and the sheet metal was the father-in-law’s attempt to stop it. I replaced all the rotten wood and laid down tar paper. I will re-shingle the roof properly this Sunday.
To add spice to the marinade, some kind people let me borrow some 35/120mm darkroom equipment while I hunt down a 4×5 view camera and enlarger within my budget. The stipulation was they get access to the their equipment when they need it, which I found very reasonable. When I’m finished fixing the shack I’ll be moving the equipment to the new studio and setting up an apparatus to hold water and maintain its temperature. I’m probably going to hook a small laundry room sink to the water barrel for feed-water and hook the drain to a barrel outside. The barrel will be circulated with an aquarium pump and it’s temperature will be held with an aquarium heater. I don’t know how well that will work during the winter but I think, when winter brings its -20 winds, I’ll be questioning the temperature of the entire shack before worrying about the water.
It’s going to be a lot of work but I feel it will be worth it. My usual approach to photography is a careful, planned method, even when shooting digital. I’ve worked in a darkroom with 35mm before but doing things such as Zone developing is tough for an entire roll of film. Shooting on sheets just feels like it will “be the right thing to do.” Not to mention that they can scan into 1.5GB images!
We headed home early due to the threat of a hail storm looming over the eastern edge of Calgary. Luckily the threat abated and the garden will be safe. The sun passed through some extremely dense clouds, however, and I just HAD to snap a panoramic together. I stitched them together with PTGui then processed the image further afterwards.
The final image is 13890×2574 pixels. If it were printed at 240dpi it would be about 58×11 inches. This is fine and dandy but I just wish I could display images like these like they’re supposed to be: in person. I’m getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger on purchasing a traditional 4×5 view camera and setting up a dark room. I really need to create some images that can make an impact in person to complement the images I share on the web.
