One of the two photographs I took of the Botanical Gardens was a bit of a bust. The shot was alright but I got a big light leak on it. I suspect the leaks I sometimes get when shooting large format are caused by my taking insufficient care when removing the dark slide, perhaps pulling the film holder away from the camera slightly and letting light in.
Given the time and effort it takes to shoot large format (and the cost per sheet!) I decided to attempt to rescue the picture in Lightroom. I had to crop it by a not insignificant amount and then had to apply quite a lot of dehaze and spot editing to try and remove the worst effects of the light-leak. In the end though, I managed to salvage a reasonably useable image from the original. It’s not perfect – the contrast is a bit crunchy, resulting in some crushed blacks, and quite a lot of noise has been introduced, but better than no image at all.
It can’t be too bad – it managed to get into Flickr’s Explore pages somehow!
Continuing a theme from yesterday’s post, here’s another shot where my composition is out. In this shot I needed more of the foreground to avoid cropping the bench, and also more of the left hand side to avoid the edge of this part of the greenhouse being cropped. I should have moved further back, which would have solved both isssues.
Someone did point out that the loss of the left hand side of the frame could have been caused when inserting the film-holder, which could have accidentally caused the tripod head to rotate slightly if it wasn’t locked tight. It could easily have been my fault for not checking my edges carefully though.
I took this picture a few weeks back on a quick trip out to shoot some sheets of film with my 4×5 camera. It was a bright day with plenty of light and, with a dark-cloth attached, I was able to see the image on the camera’s ground glass quite clearly. I still messed up the composition though.
Ideally I should have either taken a few steps back to get more of the scene into frame, or moved a little to the left (either physically or using some shift on the camera). This would have allowed me to get the whole grave marker on the left in frame, which I think would have improved the picture.
I still like the shot, and it’s impressive to see the amount of detail that the format can provide, but I do need to get better with my composition when using the ground glass.
Taken February 2023. (I can’t remember the specific date. I normally look at my Google Timeline to check such things but remeber that I forgot to take my phone out with me on this occasion so it didn’t record the trip).
Being eager to shoot more pictures with my 4×5 camera I visited this old school which I had passed by before.
Previously it was looking run down and somewhat bedraggled but, in the interim, it has been renovated and turned into homes (or maybe one big, fancy home). While this re-purposing of the old structure is good, from a photographic standpoint it doesn’t look half as interesting as it did before. Still, having driven up there I decided to make the shot anyway.
Taken February 2023. (I can’t remember the specific date. I normally look at my Google Timeline to check such things but remember that I forgot to take my phone out with me on this occasion so it didn’t record the trip).
Another couple of shots taken this week and then developed today. The good news is that I’m now fully confident that the light leak issues I had before are now resolved. The bad news is that I think I somehow managed to load these two sheets incorrectly. Not in a significant way, but negatives from both sides of the film holder indicate the the sheet wasn’t aligned properly and the photos are wonky as a result. You can see what I mean in this photo of the negs on my lightbox – if you look at the film border you can see how it’s out of whack:
I’m not sure how I managed to do this and, to be honest, I didn’t even realise it was possible! None of the other sheets I’ve loaded have suffered from this problem so I will have to keep an eye on things in the future. Sadly it means that the side-on picture of the church is spoiled as the wonky frame has chopped the top off the church – this is made worse when scanned as the border isn’t included in the scan.
The other image was retrievable though as I’d not framed the subject so tightly. The good news is that these were really just a couple of final test shots to make sure everything was working ok. I think I’ll make sure not to tightly frame my subjects for the time being though, just to be safe.
Here’s the shot that worked ok. If you click through to Flickr you can see that there’s a lot of detail.
Following on from yesterday’s post about me testing my newly repaired 4×5 camera, here’s the second of the two photos I made while out. Again, this is nothing special, and mainly a test shot. It’s a little out of focus at the top of the frame, but otherwise ok. Had I spent more time I would have corrected the focusing.
I’ve photographed this willow tree on a number of occasions (see here, here, and here) and I think it would be a good subject for a more carefully considered large format shot if I pick the conditions right.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I’d been having problems with light leaks when using my 4×5 Chroma camera. When I posted on another forum about the difficulties I was encountering the guy who builds the Chroma range of cameras, Steve Lloyd, got in touch and offered to take a look at the camera. I gratefully accepted his offer and, about a week later, I received my camera back with the problem resolved. This was extremely kind of Steve as I bought the camera second-hand, so I didn’t have a warranty or anything. This is amazing service and the sort of good stuff that really should be praised.
Anyway, today was the first opportunity to give the camera a test. The weather looked bright but a fog began to appear just as I was setting out. Normally I really like foggy conditions, but some more brightness might have been preferable today. My intent was to walk to the local country park, shoot a couple of frames, and then get them developed at lunchtime, which I managed to achieve. The photos aren’t the best as I was rushing to get everything done before starting work, so the focus is slightly out against what I would have hoped for had I had the time to be more precise. This shot of the bench is in focus, but I would have liked the foreground gravel to be sharp too rather than the background grass, but getting the camera movements just right on large format takes time, and I had little today.
The good news is that there are no signs of any light leaks. Fair enough, it was a quite dimly lit morning, but I would still have expected to see efects on the negatives were the problem still occuring. I’ll try to get out in some brighter light and test it in those conditions too. Fingers crossed that it’s all ok now though. It’ll be nice to go out and use it properly and spend the time I need to do so.
Since taking posession of my Chroma 4×5 camera I’ve exposed 12 sheets of film. Two of those were complete write offs due to, ahem, user error. Some shots have looked good – not necessarily artistically so, but technicaly pleasing (at least given my current level of skill with the camera) – but quite a few have been beset by light leaks. When I developed four sheets the other day I was disappointed to see more light leaks. Two of the shots had significant leaks, the other two less noticeable, but the defect looked very similar to some of the other frames that had suffered similar problems.
My initial though was that there was a problem with one of my film holders, but on sharing the images with some other large format users, they all pointed to the problem being caused by light getting behing the film holder when it was in the camera. One way to test for this is to put a light source inside the camera in a darkened room and see if light can be seen escaping. By doing this I was able to see than no light was getting out behind the film holder but that there was a very fine strip of light visible where the camera back is magnetically attached to the body. The gap appears to be razor thin – a small fraction of a millimetre – but if light is getting out, then light can get in too.
I wondered about trying to finagle a fix – maybe putting strips of tape in the join, or maybe a shaped piece of light seal foam, but then I contacted the guy who manufactures the camera and he very kindly offered to take a look at it and see if he can identify the problem. So I now need to find a sutable carton, pack it up, and get it shipped across to him for a (hopefully!) fix.
So I’ll be shooting smaller formats for now. Not that I was ever going to give up on 135 and 120 in any case.
Here are two of the affected shots from the Chroma. The first one has little impact, but that’s possibly due to the busier nature of the scene. The second shot shows the light leak more noticeably on the left side of the image. Other shots are much more badly affected than these. While I’m disappointed by the light leaks, I can at least see than my ability to get things properly focused with the camera and its movements is improving. Still work to do, but much improved on before. I’m also impressed by just how much detail the 4×5 film can resolve.
Another large format attempt. This one is possibly my favourite so far that I’ve shot with my Chroma. But it’s still not as good as I want it to be.
There are two main issues with this picture. One, not visible in the image you see, is that I think I put too little developer in the tank as this picture and another developed at the same time both had a thin strip of underdeveloped negative along one of the short edges. I was sure that I’d used 475mm of solution are required by the tank I was using, but clearly not. This resulted in my having to crop the image. The second issue is the focus at the left side of the frame, which is soft. I think I must have had a little bit of swing taking place and it only seems to take an imperceptable amount to knock the focus out. I am going to have to take much better care over this in future.
Apart from the above-mentioned issues though, the image is very sharp and I’m quite happy with it.
Yesterday didn’t work out how I’d hoped. My plan was to go out in the afternoon and make some photographs, and that’s what I did. However it was a disappointing experience. Firstly, because the weather was rainy and gloomy in the morning, I had to wait until the afternoon before I could go out (well, I suppose I could have gone out and took some rainy-day pictures in the morning, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do). The weather forecast for the afternoon showed it would be a mixture of sunshine and sunny spells but the reality was that it was largely overcast, with the sun only being visible as a vague disk behind the cloud cover most of the time. This annoyed me – I have a dim view of weather forecasting apps, most of which can’t even seem to show the current weather correctly, much less what it’s going to be like later on or the following day. The untrustworthiness of them is frustrating. However, the weather was what it was and I would have to make the best of it.
I took my Yashicamat 124G, but I was hoping to shoot some more pictures using the Chroma 4×5. I decided to head out to Shireoaks and maybe take a picture of Steetley Chapel before driving to Shireoaks and walking along the Chesterfield Canal to Turnerwood.
I visited the chapel first and spend time setting up my large format gear. I was careful to check the exposure, setting up the correct aperture, shutter speed, making sure the focus was correct, and then checking the shutter was firing as expected before taking the shot. I removed the dark slide, took the picture, and then packed everything up, got in the car and drove to Shireoaks. After parking the car, I set off towards the canal, grumbling under my breath about the poor light that was filtering through the clouds. On top of this a breeze had gotten up, placing ripples ont the surface of the water to kill any reflections and also jeopardising any longer exposures with the big large format camera, whose bellows are great for catching the wind.
When I arrived at Turnerwood I set the camera up for a picture of the lock keepers cottages that sit beside the water there. It’s an attractive location, but the conditions were dull and not particularly flattering. Nevertheless, I got everything ready for the picture. And then I realised something unfortunate…
I became uncomfortably aware that when I’d made the first shot back at Steetley Chapel that, after taking great care to get everything set up properly, I’d then gone and removed the wrong darkslide from the film holder, effectively exposing the sheet of film through the ground glass on the back of the camera rather than through the lens. I could even remember seeing the dark slide moving behind the ground glass as I removed it ferchrissakes! This didn’t help my already low mood, but I decided to take the second shot anyway, making sure that I was using the unexposed sheet of film. I took the shot and then tried to reinsert the dark slide.
It wouldn’t go in.
Instead of sliding true it instead hit some resistance which I’m pretty sure was the sheet of film. After several attempts I came to the realisation that there was nothing else to do but remove the film holder, thereby ruining a second sheet. Great going eh?
I decided to have another attempt at the shot, this time using a remaining sheet of Fomapan 100 that was in another film holder (the other shot on there was of a silver birch tree I photographed in the Peak District a couple of weeks ago). This time all seemed to go well and I was able to reinsert the dark slide correctly and then pack everything away. I took a shot of the scene on the Yashicamat too while I was there, just in case.
I shot another couple of sheets of HP5+ back in Shireoaks and these seemed to work ok with no obvious problems. I’ve not developed these yet though, so who knows?
As I drove home the sun emerged from the clouds and bathed everything in perfect light. Sigh.
I’ve developed the Fomapan sheets today with somewhat mixed results. The Silver Birch picture was largely a write off, having a massive light leak that took out around a third of the image. I’ve attempted a crop, but it’s not great. Partially because it wasn’t what I wanted from the picture and also, from a technical point of view, because I’ve got some unwanted camera movements in there which has done odd things with the plane of focus.
The shot made at Turnerwood was much better, but the light wasn’t great, so it’s a little flat looking. It also has some issues with camera movements – this time some front swing that means the left and right edges have some softness. I’m going to have to pay close attention to these things in future to avoid them creeping into my pictures again.
I also loaded my first sheets of film into the holders today. The camera came with four film holders already loaded with film, so I’ve had to shoot those before getting the chance to load some myself. This also seemed to got well though, thankfully.
More large format cock-ups to come soon no doubt. 🙂
Steel City Snapper photography 