Winter Photos

Great to see the snow from a photographic point of view even if not from any other.

I'm still enjoying my new acquisition, the folding 6 x 6 Solida and used that mainly whilst we had snow around but there were some restricting factors. I had loaded the camera with ISO 400 film and with the brightness due to the sun and the snow was struggling to get the indicated exposure and having to use the fastest shutter speed I had - 1/200 and the smallest aperture - f22 and this has shown up a problem with the camera in that at that small aperture there does appear to be some vignetting. That problem usually occurs at the other end with wide open lens but can be a problem when closed right down too.

Whilst thinking about exposure did anyone have problems with their snow pictures? Either rather muddy and underexposed or with a colour cast? If you did its due to the auto features on the camera making assumptions about the scene its seeing. With both exposure and white balance the camera assumes its seeing an "average" scene and will do the calculation of speed and aperture accordingly but obviously with large areas of bright white in the frame the scene is not average and hence the camera tends to under expose. Likewise with white balance it assumes that all the colours its seeing when mixed together should be a mid grey and again that's obviously not the case. If you shoot in RAW then adjusting the white balance in the computer is simple, if shot in jpg possible but not so easy. If we get any more snow and you have had this exposure problem just use your exposure compensation control to open up the settings a bit.

Anyway here's a selection of my photos, I decided to go mainly for the "Bleak mid winter" look!

New Toy

I spent the kids inheritance the other day and bought myself another camera, a Franka Solida medium format 6 x 6 folding camera for the exorbitant price of £10 from E-bay. It was advertised as being in good working order but when I received it I found that shutter release on the top of the camera wasn't working and in trying to find out why I managed to jam the shutter as I tried to use the delayed action setting whilst the shutter speed was on "B" and this is a definite no no on any camera.

The beauty though of these old camera's (this one comes from the 50's) is that they are very simple to take apart and adjust and after a Goggle search I found some useful instructions on how to approach the problem and managed to take out the front lens element and sort out the jammed shutter and replace the lens. I then had to recalibrate the focusing and needed a ground glass screen so that I could see what was on the film plane and used the screen out of my Bronica which was quite adequate and manged that adjustment too.

That got me back to where I had started with the problem of the top shutter button not working. There was also a lever on the lens itself which after the shutter was cocked fired the shutter correctly but the linkage from that top button wasn't anywhere near the lever to move it. A quick query on a forum produced the answer to that and all I had to do was to physically twist the whole lens unit around about half an inch and hey presto everything worked! Try that on a modern digital camera!

So now to see if it could actually take pictures. I loaded it up with Ilford Delta 400 and went for a walk around Bungay, used up the 12 shots and got back and developed the film. I was really pleased to see the results hanging up to dry. The exposures looked good which meant that the shutter speeds were probably reasonably accurate ( they can get slow and sticky on old cameras if they are not used), and there didn't appear to be any fogging meaning the bellows were light tight. This I found not to be quite right as I have discovered a small amount of fogging on one edge of some frames but I'm not sure what the cause of that is.

As soon as they were dry I scanned them in and was really pleased with the results - see some examples below. The focusing seemed accurate too after my lens adjustment.

The beauty of this camera is that it folds up small enough to go in a coat pocket and produces medium format size images with all the quality and tonal range that gives me. The reason I got this camera rather than using my Father in laws old Kodak folder is that the viewfinder on the Kodak is incredibly small and difficult to use and its impossible to actually compose a photo. Really it just lets you know that you have the camera pointing in the right direction.

The only other piece of equipment I'm carrying at the moment is an exposure meter but given the latitude of film I think after a few rolls I should be able to guesstimate that close enough. The distance also has to be estimated but as I shall probably be using the camera mainly for landscapes that shouldn't be an issue.

Any comments gratefully received if only to let me know someones reading this!

Developing colour film

I decided to have a look at developing my own colour film. I remember doing once some 50 years ago and although I seem to remember it was successful it was quite involved and I never thought about trying again. However it would be good to be able to process my colour films as well as the B & W on the boat whilst we are away otherwise I will have to wait till the end of our trip to get them processed at a lab. So I researched the subject and it did appear on the face of it to be quite straightforward the only problem being that temperature control appeared to be critical.

So I decided to give it a shot and bought a Tetenal kit for C41 film and finished the Ektar film in my Bronica with some snow shots on Friday so went for it over the weekend. There are two temperatures you can use for the development, the higher one being the standard one of 100 degrees F or a lower one at 86F which they suggest if results are uneven. I decided to start with the higher temperature and that was probably a mistake given that I was doing the developing in our utility room on Sunday which wasn't exactly a summers day and the heat in there is not that good so keeping the temperature up was a struggle!

Anyway, the process itself is not complicated, especially if you have done B& W processing, but the chemicals are slightly different in that you finish with a stabiliser and there is no long final wash mentioned in the instructions. I had read quite a few blogs on the subject and of course everyone has their own slightly different approach so I stuck to the official instructions this time.

The end result was mixed. I had some uneven development on some negatives which may have been due to the quantity of chemical I used or to the agitation I gave the film so next time I'll use the lower temperature and longer development time and see what the effect is.

Also on two frames I had the most odd colour rendering and large patches of deep blue (they looked like the warning colour when checking highlights or shadows in Lightroom). I tried rewashing the negs and one of them came out OK but the other still had some of the blue showing so I washed it again and it then had more! I think it was probably inadequate initial washing so I'll increase that next time too.

Here's a few of the resulting images:

I'll cetainly try it again but will have to refine the proceedure if I'm going to try it in the confines of the narrowboat

Mixed Results

I took myself off to Horsey on the Norfolk coast last week to photograph the seals and their pups but chose a very miserable day to do it. The weather wasn't too bad when I left Bungay but on the coast there was a very think mist with visibility down to about 25 metres. It was really quite eary walking along behind the dunes with no sounds what so ever and only very restricted views.

I did end up taking a few photographs but didn't think they would be particularly good and so it proved with this being about the best of the bunch.

I also took one or two general views but again nothing to write home about although with the aid of photoshop and increasing the contrast dramatically this one has a certain atmosphere:

The snow has ceretainly given plenty of opportunities for the cameras to come out, here's a couple of mine from the other day:

All these were taken with my Bronica MF camera using Delta 400 film.

One interesting result is this multi exposure shot taken by accident. I hadn't realised I had moved the double exposure prevention lever on the camera until I noticed that the film frame number wasn't changing so I have 3 frames on one. Quite interesting, I'll have to use it for real I think and see what I can do:

Day out with the camera

The Friday before last I decided to go out for the day specifically to take pictures. Its something I ought to do more often but I normally find that I'm taking photographs when out for another reason, walking the dogs visiting friends etc.

I decided to visit Oulton Broad and see if I could get some photographs with my MF Bronica of the many squirrels that I knew lived in the parkland at the edge of the Broad.

It wasn't a brilliant day weather wise being overcast and cold and so I was forced to use a fairly large aperature given that I wanted to keep my shuuter speed high. Also I used the longer of the two lens I have a 150mm which is the equivilent of about 100mm in 35mm terms.

This was the best of the bunch, the squirrels there are incredibly tame and next time I go I'll take some food for them which will hopefully keep them in one place longer.

The film was Delta 400 and exposure with the 150mm lens f4 1/125sec
One disadvantage of shooting with this set up  is the very narrow depth of field as illustrated on this photo, you can see from the ground that the distance in focus is only a few inches:

I decided to move on and see what I could find in Lowestoft to shoot on a cold dank cloudy January day and here's the result which I think sums up the day!

And finally down the coast at Pakefield: