I guess the title of today’s post fits a couple of things that I’ve done in the past two days with regards to the large format photography I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

The first is the exposure of the picture below – and I mean the exposure – because it was certainly based upon little more than guesswork and crossed fingers. That’s not to say that I didn’t make some effort to meter the scene as best I could, but it was a mixture of bright highlights and dark shadows and all I had was my Sekonic L-308 incident meter and the light meter app on my phone. Ideally I would have had a spot meter to correctly assess the scene and put everything into the correct “zones”. But I don’t own a spot meter, and have nought but a basic understanding of the zone system in any case.

So instead I used a couple of methods to try and guage the exposure. The light meter app on the phone was used to see what it gave me for the whole scene, and then for the brightest and darkest areas. It’s not a precise as a 1° meter, but it gave me some readings. I then repeated the process with the L-308 in it’s reflective mode. The readings from both were in the same ballpark roughly, but not really precise, and I was getting exposure settings at between 8 seconds and 1/30th of a second at f/22. In the end IU decided to chance it on a 2 second exposure. Again, some degree of winging it was required as the longest exposure on my large format lens is 1 second, so I had to use bulb and “Mississippi” it.

The other area of wingmanship to take place was with regards the development. Because one of the unit sizes for 4×5 film is 25 sheets, and because my developing tank takes four sheets at a time, there will come a time where I have a stray sheet of film left from a box. On this outing I had three. All different stocks! I could develop then individuality, but I find developing film something of a chore at the best of times, so I wanted to see if I could combine all three sheets (Ilford HP5+, Ilford FP4+, and Fomapan 100) in one session.

My first though was to use stand development – something I’ve not tried before – but then I discovered that, if I pushed the Foampan 100 by a stop, it would take 9 minutes in an Ilfotex DD-X 1+4 solution – the same as HP5+! The FP4+ was trickier as it takes 10 minutes in the same developer at it’s 125asa box speed. So I decided to pull it slightly and meter it at 100asa – barely any difference really, but hopefully enough to compensate for the shorter development.

So today I developed all three sheets for 9 minutes in DD-X. And they all look fine.

The church interior shot did need some additional work in Photoshop. Although there was plenty of dynamic range captured, the scan would either feature blown highlights in the window, of very deep shadows (or a halfway house that looked a bit muddy). So, in the end I made two scans, one exposing for the window, the other for the interior, and then merged the two to allow me to get a better overall exposure. It’s still a bit noisy in the shadows, but I can live with that (although I did notice that Epson Scan seems to have been delivering JPEGs rather than TIFF files recently, so I must hace altered a setting at some point. I’ll make sure my next scans are set back to TIFFs and not whether that improves shadow noise.

I’ll post the other two shots from the multi-development session when I’ve uploaded them to Flickr, but in the meantime here is the church interior photograph – taken inside Holy Trinity Church, Ashford in the Water.

Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°

Taken 1 August 2023.