Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
My final shot taken while using the knackered yellow filter. As with the other pictures shot with this filter, there are unusual out of focus areas on the image – in this one, it’s the trees (and part of the bridge suspension cables) beyond the front of the boat. The filter is now in the bin.
Otherwise, I’m pleased with this shot.
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 28 August 2023.
This vintage ice-cream truck was parked close to the car park when I visited the Humber Bridge and made for an obvious subject for a picture. Annoyingly, it’s another shot marred by the out-of-focus issue that I wrote about yesterday, and I still have another two sheets to develop where I also used the yellow filter that I suspect to be the cause, so those might also exhibit the same problems.
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 28 August 2023.
Another photo of the Humber Bridge, and another affected by some unusual out of focus areas (this time the far river bank in the lower right of ther image). The good news is that I may have worked out the cause of these odd defects – I think it might be the yellow filter I’ve been using. The rationale behind this is that I’ve realised that the out-of-focus areas are only present in shots where I used the filter. All the others are either fine, or any OOF bits can be easily put down to camera movements.
The next thing will be to take some photographs without the filter. Hopefully these will be ok and I can move on and put this situation behind me (and also throw the filter in the bin – it was only a cheap one. Which I gues may be from where the problem stems…).
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 28 August 2023.
A couple of pictures from a recent trip to the Humber Bridge. For once I actually got nice conditions, with plenty of light and also an interesting sky, helped quite a lot by a yellow filter. I did have to hang around for awhile on occasion when the sun was obscured behind clouds, but I can’t really complain.
I’m happy with these two pictures but, again, there are issues with the focusing, with the far tower of the bridge being out of focus in both images, even though I’m pretty certain I checked it was ok before taking the picture. I’m wondering if it might be the way I use my loupe to focus and so I’ have’ve made some changes to this proces ready for my next 4×5 outing. Fingers crossed.
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 28 August 2023.
Another large format shot. And another with faults, this time some out of focus elements in the middle right of the frame. I’m not sure whether this might not just be a gust of wind blowing the power lines and trees about though. I’ve had similar issues with other shots however, including some I’ve just developed, so it could well be something else causing it. More (time consuming and tedious) trial and error work will no doubt be required. So far I have to say that it’s the promise of large format that is keeping me going rather than the actual process – 35mm and medium format are sooo much less faff!
Still, the problem in this picture is barely noticeable unless you start pixel peeping, and otherwise I like the picture. Maybe I should give myself a break. I used a yellow filter here which has really given the skies some nice contrast.
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken 1 August 2023.
Last week, when I had a few days off work, I decided to go and shoot some more sheets of film with my large format camera. It’s been over six months now since I first got a 4×5 camera, and in that time I’ve bought two of them. This wasn’t my original intent but, due to problems with the first camera that I was unable to resolve I was left with two options. The first, give up on large format, wasn’t really an option as I’d invested in all the associated kit that goes with the format (plus I didn’t want to give up on it). The second option was to bite the bullet and buy a replacement camera and, thanks to finding a used Chamonix model at a good price, this was the route I took. There was actually a third option too – to borrow a camera from someone, and this is what I’d set out to do before I found the Chamonix. In fact I’ve still been loaned another camera and a couple of lenses, meaning that I’ll soon have shot three large format cameras in this relatively short period of time!
However, shooting large format is not something that can be done on a whim. While 35mm and even medium format cameras can generally be picked up and taken out to make some pictures quickly and easily, large format demands much more of my time, both in terms of setting the equipment up to make a picture, and also in preparing for an outing in the form of loading film into holders using a changing bag. No grabbing a roll of film and quickly dropping it into the back of the camera with this format!
What this has meant is that I haven’t really been out with a large format camera all that many times and so I’m not well practiced in using the gear. I know what I’m doing, but I’m not very good at it yet, which means I tend to make mistakes every time I do have a session. Not major mistakes usually, but enough to reduce the quality of my work to some extent. Still, practice makes perfect, so I try to get out and use the large format when a suitable opportunity presents itself.
I had hoped that last week would be such an opportunity as the weather had looked promising, but it turned out to be less optimal than I’d hoped in the end. I decided to visit Magpie Mine in the Peak District, a place I’ve photographed before, and which I thought might be promising for some 4×5 photographs. The day had a cloudy sky, albeit one with plenty of texture and relatively frequent gaps where the sunshine would break through. With smaller formats it’s relatively easy to take advantage of the good light when it fleetingly appears. Not so much with large format as, by the time you’ve set everything up, the light has changed again. This was made even more difficult by a brisk wind that was present. While the camera wasn’t being blown about too much (although I did lose one shot due to camera shake), the darkcloth that I use to be able to see the ground glass on the rear of the camera was whipping around like a dervish and making it very difficult to check composition and focus.
While there was the occasion splash of nice light, I didn’t have the skill (or patience to wait!) to make use of it, so the shots I took at the location are a little flat. I’d planned on shooting more images while there, but the conditions (well, the wind) meant I decided to head off to somewhere in a more sheltered position.
Of the three shots posted here today, the first is probably the best executed. The focus is good across the piece and, while the lighting could be better, the subject isn’t harmed by it too much. The second picture is my facourite in terms of composition, but I wish I’d closed the aperture another stop as the distant buildings aver a teeny bit soft (although the wall in the forground and the building at middle distance are both fine). The final picture of the lone chimney, was a bit of an experiment. I wondered how it might look shot wide open at f/5.6. However all this has done really is soften the foreground grass, add a noticeable vignette and, because there was probably a bit of tilt on the front standard that I neglected to check properly due to my frustration with the wind, has thrown the top of the chimney out of focus too. Still, as I’ve already said, practice makes perfect, and every time I use the camera it’s a learning experience!
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 August 2023.
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.
Here are the results of the other two sheets of 4×5 film I shot at Victoria Quays the other week.
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 15mins 45secs @ 20°
Taken 8 July 2023.
After yesterday’s post where I spoke about missing the focus slightly on a 4×5 large format photo, despite not rushing, here is a picture where I did exxactly the same thing, although this time I was rushing.
When I say rushing, that’s relative. You can’t really rush a picture with a field camera in the same way you can with 35mm or medium format (or, I guess, large format press cameras to an extent). There is still a lot of setting up to do before you get to the nitty gritty of finessing the focus etc.
At the time I took this picture there was no-one in the frame and my intent was to photograph the building, with the canoes and the front of tha canal boat. However, I was concious that there was a sizeable group of young people along with an instructor who was prepping them for going in the canoes. As I was setting up the shot, I heard him say something along the lines of “Right, follow me.” and the group headed towards my field of view.
I didn’t really want a big crowd of kids in the shot, so took this picture quickly when just two people were in the frame (one obscured by the other) and, because I was rushing, I didn’t check focus properly. The centre of the frame (horizontally) is fine, but the sharpness drop steadily towards the top of the building. Again, had this been reversed so that the lower part of the frame was softer, it wouldn’t have mattered because that’s just water and distorted reflections.
To make matters worse, the group of people then proceeded to walk right through the frame, exiting to the right, meaning I could have waited and got a better shot anyway!
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 15mins 45secs @ 20°
Taken 8 July 2023.
I’ve photographed the straddle wharf at Victoria Quays on many occasions, but this is the first on 4×5 large format.
I still need to learn more patience with the format as, although this is a picture I’m happy with, there’s still a little softness in the upper part of the image where the front-standard must have had a slight bit of tilt in play. It only affects the roofs of the buildings and the upper branches of the tree, and everything through the middle of the scene is sharp from edge to edge. It would have been preferable had the tilt been reversed and the softeness had affected the water, where it would have had little noticeable effect. The soft focus is only really noticeable at magnification and I doubt you can see it in the smaller res version published here.
I didn’t rush this picture (I have one that I did to show in the next day or so though, so don’t worry, you’re not missing out!), but I also didn’t spend enough time fine tuning the focus. I think I might consider buying a more powerful loupe – the 4x magnification model I have is very good, but perhaps a 6x would better ensure I don’t miss the detail?
Chamonix 045N-1. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 15mins 45secs @ 20°
Taken 8 July 2023.
Steel City Snapper photography 