Winter is coming

While it’s still the early stage of fall where I live for our friends in the North winter is already well on it’s way.  Hope you were able to get some nice fall colors with your slide film when it was at it’s peak!  For me when winter arrives it’s time to focus on black and white photography.  I shoot black and white year round but I find that the funnest and most challenging time to shoot landscape photography is in the winter.  Something about the starkness of trees that have lost most of their leaves, snow on the ground and ice on the ponds and lakes makes for really interesting photography.  Plus it gives me an excuse to get out of the house on otherwise cold and dreary days.

Winter photography has it’s own set of unique challenges.  White snow against dark trees makes for a high contrast scene.  You want to keep you snow white but you don’t want to loose the detail of the texture in most cases, and you also may want to keep some detail in the trees if you can help it.  If you meter snow and over expose by 2 stops you will get white snow but often times the overexposure will make for very high contrast.  When printing this loss of detail can be catastrophic to your image if not handled correctly, which takes a lot of work.  Scanning gives you more control as long as the information was captured on the negative, but it may not be as visually appealing as the scene looked to the human eye when captured.

So what are the tricks of the trade for those fantastic winter photos taken by the masters?  Well one method which seems to be effective is larger format film in slower ISO’s than most of us work with.  Medium format negatives are a big improvement over 35MM in landscape because of the larger surface area.  With more surface area to work with tonal graduations are more gradual.  Slower film captures more detail so break out that tri-pod.   Careful consideration to your metering is also paramount.  If you use the in camera or handheld meter’s recommendation without regard to your scene more than likely you will not get the image your after unless you happen to get lucky.  Like most of you I can’t afford a fancy spot meter.  I do own an inexpensive 300mm zoom lens camera that fits my very affordable EOS 35mm camera with state of the art (in the film era anyway) metering.  Instant spot meter.  It doesn’t weigh much and it’s a nice kit for taking pictures of detailed smaller objects that normally get lost in a landscape as well.

Lastly a bit about your kit in winter.  If you have a camera or other gear that relies on batteries bring spare batteries when you’re in near freezing or below temperatures.  Keep them in a pants pocket or somewhere they will stay warm.  Batteries do not always work well in the cold.  It’s a good idea to bring gloves and water.  Even though it’s cold your body can still dehydrate while out hiking.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing Wolfgang Moersch’s photostream on on Flickr you might have seen some of his winter work done with his Blad and Holga.  Wolfgang Moersch is a master printer and has been at this for a while which is evident by the images he produces.   If you’ve never seen his work go check it out, it’s simply amazing.

Fancy a coffee?

Like most people I think of coffee as a enjoyable warm beverage, that has the ability to give one a bit of a boost in the mornings. Imagine my amusement when I also found out you can develop film in the stuff?  I went from disbelief to utter amazement in the space of a few seconds. However, I was just starting to dip my toes back into black and white developing again and wanted to take things slowly rather rush gung-ho into every cool thing I’d recently discovered.

Now let’s fast forward 18 months, to the point in time where I actually get my act together to try this out. I offered up a roll of Shanghai GP3 to deity of experimentation and shot it at box speed.

Caffenol is very simple to make:

Cheap strong basic coffee granules (supermarket stuff) as the cheapest brands have higher amounts of caffeic acid.

Washing Soda – may also be called Soda Ash, but what you’re looking for is Sodium Carbonate (Na2CO3), waterfree (anhydrous).

Ascorbic Acid – This needs to be absolutely pure.

The ascorbic acid I ordered online, mainly because where I live it is nigh on impossible to buy stuff in pure powdered form.

For mixing and quantities I followed this recipe for Caffenol-C-M by Reinhold.

It seems there are different schools of thought with regards to mixing, some like to put the ingredients into the same container one after the other, some people suggest dissolving the coffee and the washing soda+ascorbic separately and then mixing the 2 liquids. I haven’t really tried enough to give an opinion on this and with my next batch I shall try a different mixing method.

I don’t usually presoak, but with the caffenol I did, mainly to wash some of that lovely blue colour from the Shanghai film and because what I’d read was suggesting to do so.

5 minute – presoak with water at 20c

12 minutes – caffenol, 10 inversions first and then 3 every minute.

2 minutes – used a water to stop development. Inversions as above.

6 minutes – fixer – 10 inversions and then 3.

Washing – 10 inversions then dump, 10 inversions then dump, water with photoflo, 20 inversions then dump.

It really is that easy and no harder than your usual black and white processing.  But don’t take my word for it, give it a try

So that you may research this yourself, here are a few links to get you on your way.

Caffenol Video

Caffenol.org

Caffenol.blogspot.com

Digital Truth

and here are 2 flickr groups to check out -

Caffenol Private Palace

Caffenol

Pushing film

Neopan 400 @1600 Nikkor 50mm F1.4 at f1.4

One of the great things about most “modern” black and white films is that they have a wiggle room for making an exposure. Photographers have learned to exploit this wiggle room in order to shoot their film at higher shutter speed by rating the film at a higher ISO then box speed. But like all things in life and photography this is no free lunch sacrifices are made.

Any given film has a range from light to dark from which it can capture an image. Ansel Adams illustrated this with the zone system. When you push a film (i.e. shoot it at a higher rated speed) you compress that range between what is commonly called the toe and shoulder. By compressing that range you create more contrast between black and white because the tonal graduation between the two becomes steeper and less gradual. When you’re working with a negative the size of a 35mm frame this compression can become downright ugly. To use Ansel Adams expression, it can become chalk and soot meaning all the detail is lost. Sometimes this can be used to artistic effect but in landscape photography it’s generally undesirable. It also can make grain more pronounced, again, when used in the right setting that grain can create a mood and sometimes that’s desired, but often it just becomes an ugly distraction that takes away from an image rather than compliment it. When printing on paper which is normally higher contrast then a negative to begin with the loss of detail is normally worse. With today’s scanners and post processing software however you can make some adjustments and save some of that detail.

Pushing film is really very simple to do and sometimes you have a choice of either pushing your film or not taking the photo at all. For example, the first picture in this article was taken wide open with a fast lens using available light. At 400 iso my shutter speed would have been so slow that the images would not have been as sharp because of camera shake and the motion of the musicians. When your subject is a moving target or you don’t have a tripod pushing your film can be your only option. To push film you simply rate it at a higher speed in your light meter (or your brain if you’re not using a light meter). By adding 2 stops to your shutter speed or if you’re goal is to increase your depth of field stopping down your aperture. If I confused you with the term stopping down it simply means closing the aperture two stops (i.e. going from f2.8 to f5.6). At this point you shoot normally and then if you’re smart you’ll use a sharpie to write the film ISO on the canister or roll of film when you’re done so that when it comes times to process it you remember that you have to do things a little differently.

For the most part to push your film in the development process requires you to either extend development time or increase your temperature. There are some developers that do not require this such as diafine but I’ll save that for another article at this time since I have no experience with it. A good guide to start with is with the massive development chart found at Digital Truth.

Chances are if you can dream it someone has tried it and posted the results there.  This is just a starting point however and you can tailor your times and temps to get your own desired results.  The beautiful thing about photography is that there really isn’t a right or wrong way to do things, there is only a way that achieves the best results for you.  We all have different tastes and our own tastes evolve over time.  Personally I like high contrast and I use this technique regularly.

How to mix HC-110 Dilution B

If you’ve ever had to mix a gallon of D-76 from powder you know it’s a lot of developer to have sitting in your fridge. For me that’s no good, I need more room for PBR and left overs. After reading The Negative by Ansel Adams I decided to give HC-110 a try. After trying it I knew that I had finally found my primary developer. I still love D-76 but HC-110 is a beautiful developer and so much easier to use. This is a little video I shot earlier this year, hope you enjoy. Please note the music background, it’s Strange Brew by Cream.  Thank you to the reader who pointed that out, for some reason I thought that was Derek and the Dominoes…  Hard to keep all of Eric Clapton’s bands straight!

Stand and Semi Stand Development by Larry Dressler AKA inetjoker

Stand and Semi Stand Development by Larry Dressler AKA inetjoker http://www.flickr.com/photos/jokerphotography/

Photo by Larry Dressler aka inothejoker

Stand development

Q: What is it?

A: it is the use of a highly dilute developer with an initial agitation of 30 seconds to 1 minute then setting it down for an extended amount of time with out further agitation.

Q: Semi-Stand Development what is it?

A: it is similar to Stand development but during the stand process you give the film tank an inversion or 2 every 10-30 minutes.

Q: Why use this method?

A: There are several reasons the first one is that it allows for a great compensating effect with your negatives if the light is very contrast or the film is a high contrast film.
The second reason is that you have a film you don’t know the development time for but you have shot and wish to develop. The nice thing is that with the very dilute developer and a wide latitude in time the film will develop to finality at box speed and then stop.

Q: What developers work well for this type of Development?

A: Rodonal is the #1 developer used for this method because it won’t cause Bromide drag. What is bromide drag? Bromide drag is the accumulation of bromide a byproduct of the development of the film and it causes streaks and uneven development.
Other developers can be used like HC-110 but in that case the semi stand method is required because it will allow for removal of bromide build up.

Q: Times and Dilutions what do I do?

A: This is where it is easy and not. With Rodonal it is accepted that at 1-100 with full stand 1 hour at box speed and another hour for a 1 stop push at 20C but here is where it gets tricky. Maintaining the 20C for an hour or more. Easy answer is have the developer at about room temperature and don’t worry because unless you have them at 23C or above the times are the same and using room temperature also avoids thermal circulation within the developer.

Q: What is Thermal circulation?

A: This is the warming and cooling of the developer in the tank that causes warm to rise and cool to fall causing uneven development.

Q: Are there other ways to avoid Thermal circulation?

A: Yes and though many film manufactures don’t recommend this with their film for our method it is needed it is the Presoak. Yes the should I or not presoak. I recommend about 5 minutes in water that is at room temp to season the tank and film not only that it will swell the film to allow the developer to evenly saturate it but slowly to avoid over blown highlights.

Film photography 101: The Basics of exposure.

For most people starting out in film photography, particularly black and white film photography, properly exposing a negative seems like a dauntless task.  There are all these crazy words that don’t make sense being tossed around.  And then they try to confuse you by talking about zone system, over exposing and underexposing and what the hell is “Stop” anyway?  Well I’m here to help break it down for you in plain old English in layman’s terms.

How a light meter works.  Up until fairly recently all in camera light meters measured light the same way for all films.  Towards the end of the film camera era technology got more advanced and they came up with new ways to meter but the majority of cameras were calibrated to find “middle gray” which is somewhere around 18 percent reflected light depending on the manufacturer.  If you had a grey card you could calibrate your camera settings to middle gray and theoretically get consistent results.

But I don’t have a light meter!

A lot of times you may have a classic manual camera that takes a hard to find or illegal Mercury battery or perhaps it’s a camera that functions fine with the exception of the light meter.  A working built in light meter has been standard in most cameras for so long that many people think it’s essential to photography, but I’m here to tell you it’s not.  You don’t need a light meter in your camera or even in your camera bag.  I’m not telling you to throw one away or to tell you that if you shouldn’t buy one.  I’m just saying that if the lack of a light meter is the only thing stopping you from getting out and shooting there is a solution that works great and is free.

A light meter is a nice luxury to have but being able to shoot without one is a good skill to have as well.  I was on the other side of the world very far from home and I had a vintage handheld meter that died when a drunk at a bar dropped it on the patio.  Without my cheat sheet from Fred Parker’s website I wouldn’t have been able to use most of the cameras I brought with me since most of them either didn’t have a meter or the meter didn’t work.  But by knowing a few basic rules and common anchoring points for certain lighting situations I was able to get great photos without one.

Fred Parker’s website is well-known among photographers that spend time online.  It is called the ultimate exposure calculator.  http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm  It’s not overly technical, but for someone just starting out on film photography it might not all make sense.  There are a couple of basics you need to know and understand for all the pieces to fit together.  The rest of this article is a good primer for using the ultimate exposure calculator.

Film Speed.  Film speed is a way of measuring the speed in which your film reacts to light.  The faster the film (the higher the ISO) the less time is required to make an exposure.  What gets confusing is that the actual box speed on any given film may be lower the advertised.  There are some simple but time-consuming tests you can do to find your actual film speed.  How you process your film and how you meter (or not meter) have an effect on your negatives.  If you care about this kind of stuff I can’t recommend Ansel Adam’s book The Negative enough.  However if you just want the nuts and bolts of manual photography read on.

Aperture.  The hardest part for a new photography to wrap their mind around is that the smaller the number, the more light a lens lets in.  This is commonly known as an F stop.  This concept baffles people because they assume a small number means a small hole.  F22 sounds way bigger then F1, right?  And then they go and call it a stop.  Now everyone is really confused.  Why do they make it this hard?  Well hang in there tiger!  They call it a stop because on many lenses made before plastic was invented there was an actual “click” between settings and so it became common in photography vernacular to refer to the distance between clicks as stops.  Some lenses have half stops in between the numbers.  Cameras that control aperture digitally may even have 1/3 stops.  The common settings let in exactly twice as much light as the previous setting.  When you get at the bottom of the scale the stops may not be in whole increments as an example F1.7 is a little more than one stop below F2.8.  One stop below f2.8 is F2 but F1.8 and F1.7 let in a little more light and look more impressive for marketing.  Don’t get too hung up on the numbers eventually they’ll either come to you or you can ignore them and go happily on your way.

Shutter Speed.  These are measured as fractions of a second.  500 is 1/500th of a second.  Beware:  Old Cameras lie.  Your camera may not be exactly spot on.  Luckily film is forgiving stuff.  As in aperture each stop lets in twice as much (or half as much) light.  So 1000 is twice as fast as 500 so that’s one stop.  250 is 2 times as slow as 1000 so that’s two stops and so on.

All things being equal if you let in less light through the aperture you must keep the shutter open longer to achieve the same exposure.  If you let in more light you must reduce the amount of time the shutter stays open.  Shutter speed has an effect of motion.  The longer a shutter is open the more movement and camera shake is recorded.  Aperture affects Depth of Field, the sharpness and contrast of your lens.  In the useful range of things the larger the aperture the softer the image and contrast.  This is why top performing high-end lenses tend to cost more to make and cost more for you to buy.

Without getting super scientific I will mention that for really long exposures the law that we work with within normal parameters does not fully apply.  This is due to reciprocity law failure or Schwarzschild effect.  If you have questions or that applies to you than you can Google it.

Exposure Value or EV.  Exposure Value or EV makes it easier for some to visualize the amount of light available based on conditions.  Please refer to Fred Parker’s website, he’ll even let you download and print his very useful scale for your personal use.  I use it frequently and it’s never let me down.  The relationship between your film speed, aperture and shutter speed result in an EV.  Some cameras actually had an EV scale built-in.  My Minolta 7s has this feature and it’s really useful.  Once you get the hang of it it becomes intuitive.

The Sunny 16 rule.  The sunny 16 rule works great.  Some film manufactures even print it on the inside of their boxed film.  The principle is that if your shutter speed is set to the nearest setting equal to speed of the film (i.e. 500 for 400 ISO, 200 for 200 ISO etc) in bright full sun conditions you’ll use f16 for normal exposure.  And if it’s not sunny?  Well if it’s cloudy but still bright you could either decrease your shutter speed down one stop or maintain your shutter speed and open up your aperture one stop.  As an example 500 at F11 is equal to 1000 at f8.  Both of these result in an EV one stop lower then 500 at f16.  Fred Parkers website has a chart which gives you common lighting conditions and their EV to use as a guide.  It’s amazing how well the method actually works once you get the hang of it.