Category: Medium Format

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Woodland road (and dealing with some spotty Fomapan 100)

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A photograph of a woodland road today, taken on one of the rolls of Fomapan 100 that I’ve been having problems with. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (such as this one) I’ve been having issues with white speckles of debris when using this film. I ruled out my development process and chemicals – both worked fine when developing other film stocks. I also tried omitting a chemical stop-bath, replacing it with water, and also adding a pre-wash of the film before developing. Nothing seemed to work and the speckles still stubbornly appeared when I developed each roll of Fomapan 100.

Then, a month or so back, I came across a post on the Photrio forum which seemed to detail someone having the same problem. It turned out that other people suffering the same difficulties all had film form the same production batch. One person in a linked post had contacted Foma themselves and been advised that the cause was a harder than usual anti-halation layer on that run of film and that a specific development process might help. I tried the process myself, but still ended up with the smae spots on the negatives, albeit possibly slightly less pronounced than before.

I decided to contact Foma myself and they replied with some similar instructions, although this time I noticed an additional stage that involved a wash of the developed film in an ethanol / water mixture before the final wetting agent stage. I’ve not tried this process as yet and, I suspect, probably won’t – mostly because ethanol seems quite hard to come by, at least at a price that isn’t prohibitively high. It would likely be cheaper to buy some fresh, unproblematic film, than attempt the ethanol rinse process.

I’m grateful for Foma’s response though, plus they sent me a few rolls of film as a goodwill gesture – two rolls of Fomapan 400, plus a roll of Retropan 320. I’ve never shot Retropan 320 before, so I’m quite looking forward to giving that one a go.

Should anyone else be suffering a similar issue when developing Fomapan 100, the instructions provided to me by Foma are as follows:

In case of your already exposed & processed negatives we recommend to you the following procedure to remove the residues of remaining anti-halo layer:

1) Prepare working solution in minimum with 40% of ethanol (optimally 70%).
2) Put carefully the films into spiral´s developing tank or a spiral with the film into similar transparent container with enough ethanol solution, with emulsion layer inside of the cylinder tank/container.
3) Keep the negatives in this solution approximately 45 minutes and make moderate movement each 4-5 minutes.
4) Wash sheets of the negatives in running water from tap for 2-3 minutes.
5) Make standard drying including wetting agent (FOTONAL).

If you may decide to use also other films from the same emulsion number, we advise you to follow this procedure of processing:

1) Exposed films put inside of the spiral´s developing tank.
2) Pour distilled water or water without minerals into this developing tank and keep the films in this solution for 20-30 minutes. Occasional inversion is convenient. This solution, ca. 600 ml, is possible to use in maximum for 2 rolls.
3) Immediately after pouring the water out you can fill the tank by developing working solution keeping standard conditions of developing, best using more alkaline developer, e.g. FOMADON R09.
4) After developing we recommend to stop process just by water bath, best running filtered water, in minimum for the time of 30 seconds in water´s temperature 12-18° C. Using acidic stop bath like FOMACITRO and others is not convenient in this case, because there are needed alkaline baths to help with dissolving the hardened anti-halo layer.
5) Standard fixing.
6) Wash the strips of the negatives in running water for 20-30 minutes (according to higher or lower temperature).
7) Use ethanol solution and other steps (1-5) as described in previous paragraph.

Forest road
There’s a set of power-lines tucked away in here if you look for them…

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 23 August 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Horse chestnut tree

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Back when I was a boy, horse chestnut trees such as the one pictured here, would have been bracing themselves for the soon-to-arrive annual attack of schoolboys desperate to harvest their fruit of conkers. Here in the UK (and maybe elsewhere, I don’t know), conkers was THE sport of the school playground come autumn-time.

For those unfamiliar with the activity, a conker is a hard, nut-like seed produced by the horse chestnut tree. They fall from the branches around October time. Or, as used to be the case, they would be knocked violently from the branches by thrown sticks and stones or pulled from branches climbed by brave individuals. Each conker would be safely cocooned in a heavy, spiky outer shell that, when ripe, would split to reveal the brown, polished, wood-like ovoid within. If you were lucky you would find a previously undiscovered tree that had dropped it’s fruit on the floor. Such rarity! Such treasures!

The game is played by making a hole through the centre of the conker and threading it with a length of thread – often a shoelace – and securing it at the bottom with a knot. Two opponents would then face off and take in turns to swing their conker with force, bracing the thread tautly across the top of the back of their hand, with the intent of shattering their opponents conker.

Dedicated proponents of the sport would engage a variety of techniques to harden their “team” of conkers to maximum hardness. Baking them in an oven, or pickling them in vinegar were both methods reputed to give a conker a shell that would challenge a diamond on the moh scale. Champion conkers would be given names and attain legendary status in the schoolyard.

These days the horse chestnut is in reprieve, the sport of conkers largely consigned to history by the youngsters of today. Part of this was down to a series of bans issued by schools fearful of children with conker fractured knuckles or missing front teeth, although nowadays it’s probably mostly because of videogames and the internet. Isn’t everything?

Horse chestnut
No longer in high demand

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 23 August 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Song birds

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Eight birds sat on some power lines. When I first arrived at this location there were a lot more of them, and they reminded me of musical notation. Sadly, they flew away before I could get a picture – I think I spooked them setting the camera up – so I moved on to make photos of other things. When I got back some of them had returned, so I got this shot.

Song birds
Swallows or swifts?

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 23 August 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Provia 400 in the Peak District

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A couple of weeks ago I took an impromtu trip out to the Peak District National Park one evening after work. August is the month when the heather flowers, blanketing the landscape in a cover of purple. For the last couple of years I’ve managed to miss it altogether for one reason or another, or have only caught the end of the season when it’s past its best. So, given the weather looked nice, I decided to take to opportunity. There might even be a sunset!

I took my Bronica ETRSi loaded with a roll of slightly expired Provia 400. I’ve not shot the 400 variant before, but was quite hopeful given the decent results I’d had a few weeks earlier with some 2003 vintage Ektachrome. As I got closer to my destination it became apparent that I wasn’t the only person taking advantage of the pleasant eventing and there were a considerable number of other people and cars about. I managed to find a place to park without too much trouble though and climbed atop Higger Tor to make some photos.

Heather and boulders
Heather amongst the gritstone

I soon noticed a curious issue with my light meter, which was giving slightly odd-looking shutter speeds like 1/128. I wasn’t sure what the problem might be, but the speeds were all close enough to regular shutter settings to not give me undue concern. After a few shots it became moot anyway when the meter’s battery died – even though it had been on two bars the last time I checked – and I had to resort to my light-meter app on my phone. It was only when I got home and fitted a new battery to the light meter and looked at the manual that I realised I’d managed to set it into cine mode! Given reversal film’s intolerance of poor exposure, I resigned myself to a roll of mostly ruined shots. One receipt on my transparencies a few days later however, it seemed that most of them were not too bad at all – somewhat ironically the worst shots were the ones where I’d used the light meter app!

Anyway, I roamed around atop the plateau making a number of photos although, if I’m honest, my enthusiasm wasn’t high – I felt somewhat rushed due to the last-minute nature of the trip, plus people kept wandering into my compositions. There was no sunset either…

Down to Carl Wark
Looking down from Higger Tor towards the ancient hillfort of Carl Wark

After a pretty successful session scanning my roll of 135 Velvia 100 previously, I jumped headlong into scanning the Provia 400 when I received the transparencies from the lab. And promptly had the confidence knocked out of me. The settings that had worked so well for me in Vuescan for that earlier roll now served to deliver only disappointment. I know that it’s a different film, and I was also scanning it on my Epson V550 – not the Plustek – as that will scan medium format negatives, but I had hoped that my previous settings would at least serve as a good starting point.

The results were awful. Using the Adobe RGB output setting, that works so well on other scans in Vuescan, here served to produce ugly and blocky purple highligts on some parts of the image. Switching to a different output setting resoleved this, but now the images lost some colour and also seemed to vary in quality by a large degree from frame to frame.

In the end, I resorted to using Epsonscan – an application that has given me less than pleasing results when scanning slides in the past. This time though, it beat the Vuescan files – although it took some considerable faffing in Lightroom & Photoshop before I got something I was mostly happy with and which seemed to reflect what I could actually see on the transparencies.

On Higger Tor
A large boulder perched on the edge of the tor

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fujifilm Provia 400 (expired 2014).

Taken on 20 August 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Moored on the Cuckoo Way

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I took this shot while using up the final frames on this roll of Shanghai GP3. The walk along the towpath beside the Chesterfield Canal is known as The Cuckoo Way and can be followed from Chesterfield all the way to the point where the canal enters the River Trent, approx 50 miles away.

Although it was a very hot and bright day, the place where this canal-boat was moored was in shadow from the trees beside the canal towpath and I had to open the Zeiss to it’s widest aperture to get a decent shutter speed on the 100asa film.

I don’t normally shoot the camera wide open as it performs better when stopped down, plus the uncoupled rangefinder design can make it a bit of a best guess for fine focusing.

In this case though, the boat was far enough away for the focusing to not be too much of a concern and I quite like the way the lens has rendered the scene. It’s hardly some kind of “bokeh monster”, but has given a nice hint of seperation in the focus.

Moored on the Cuckoo Way

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Shanghai GP3. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 10 mins @ 24°.

Taken on 31 July 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Another church – Grove St Methodist church, Retford

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After mentioning yesterday that I seem to photograph a lot of churches, here’s another one. I didn’t realise that this was a church until just now, when I looked up the location on Google maps. On the day the photo was made, I just noticed an impressive looking building. I didn’t actually go around the front of the structure, where the purpose of the building would have been revealed, instead turning right and heading towards the town centre after taking the shot.

Imposing structures

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Shanghai GP3. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 10 mins @ 24°.

Taken on 25 July 2020

 

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

North Wheatley methodist chapel

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Another place of worship. I make quite a lot of photographs of churches and similar, despite rarely visiting them for their intended purposes. Despite this, I find them to be interesting locations, visually, cultually and historically, and they are often strikingly beautiful.

This chapel is in a village that I have driven past countless times in my life, but never before this occasion actually ventured within. The village (actually North AND South Wheatley as they’re pretty much joined together now) is skirted by the A620 Gainsborough Road, the route that I always take when visiting Mablethorpe on the east coast – a place I’ve been visiting since I was a young child. While it’s obvious that the village is there, it’s not a place that I, or my grandparents when they drove us as children, ever sought to stop off at.

While this was the first time I’ve ever visited the village, it was still a last minute decision while driving home from North Leverton windmill, and I didn’t really explore the place properly. There is a church, but I didn’t look there, instead taking a few photos down near the methodist chapel, which stands beside a small brook. Maybe I’ll visit again one day, or maybe this will have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I’ll simply go back to bypassing the place en-route to other destinations.

North Wheatley methodist chapel

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Shanghai GP3. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 10 mins @ 24°.

Taken on 25 July 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

North Leverton windmill

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I mentioned my photos of North Leverton windmill a couple of days ago, so here are a few of them

North Leverton Windmill

The mill was built in 1813 by a collective of local farmers to grind their corn. It was also agreed that the mill would grind corn from other farmers and “industrious poor persons” for an agreed fee.

Wind power

The windmill is completely without electrical power, relying on the wind to operate – although there are a set of engine stones for use when the wind is too low to turn the sails.

Windmill seeks prevailing wind

The windmill still sources locally grown grain to produce flour and animal feed, using traditional millstones to grind it.

Behind the cottage

I had a couple of cameras with me on the day – my Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & my Canon Sure Shot Supreme (plus my phone). Because of the hedges and fences that surround the mill, it was sometimes difficult to frame shots with the fixed focal length lenses of both cameras. Ironically in the next shot, I could have used a longer lens perhaps.

Distant mill

The final shot is of the cottage beside the mill, which had a group of chickens roaming about the place – presumably the source of the eggs in the photo I posted the other day.

Windmill cottage

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Ilford Delta 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.

Taken on 25 July 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

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…Clearly the chicken, because I posted a picture of her yesterday! 😀

This self-service dresser full of fresh eggs was in the driveway of North Leverton Windmill, which I visited three weeks ago. Time really flies! – it only feels like last weekend that I made the trip!

There will be a bunch of photos of the windmill over the coming days and weeks as I made several photos on both my Zeiss and my Sure Shot Supreme.

Who knew there was a national egg-box shortage!

More eggs tomorrow

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Ilford Delta 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.

Taken on 25 July 2020