The Darkroom Bears Fruit

The final result of my first foray back into the darkroom after an absence of two decades, warts and all. I'm sure I could do much better with this negative, but not bad for a first go. If nothing else I've learned I need to do a better job dusting.

It's a little depressing for me to think that I haven't been making darkroom prints since three or four years before the kids were born, and my oldest just turned sixteen. As my regular readers will recall (and thanks for your continued support by the way, both of you) last summer I up an old Durst M601 enlarger along with a host of related accessories and materials to set me on my way back to having a functional darkroom. Well, here we are half a year on and not much more has been heard about it. Well, here at last is a photo presented as a newly-made print from that enlarger rather than the usual negative scan.

I've presented it here in all of its glory as a straight scan, dust spots and other flaws included. The image itself isn't new, it was shot in the Autumn of 2013, a few months after I first started with the Mamiya RB67 system.I chose it because I've always liked it and because it looks best cropped square, allowing it to be printed in the Durst's stock carrier which will accommodate negatives up to 6x6. The condensers and bellows are large enough to handle full frame 6x7 negatives but unless I'm mistaken there's no carrier available in this size. I'm also just not keen on the glass sandwich design of the stock carrier. It's clever, with a four bladed mask that can adjust for any film size up to its maximum, but the glass means more surfaces to attract dust, I'll probably have to see what I can come up with on my own.This enlarger may be the subject of several DIY projects before I'm through.

Having been away from it for nearly twenty years I didn't head in to the darkroom expecting to produce anything gallery worthy. It was more a shakedown run where I hoped to find out whether I had lost much over the years or if darkroom skills were more like the proverbial ability to ride a bike. The result, I'd say, is not bad but I don't feel what I've achieved could in any way be considered the definitive print from this negative. I'm sure I'll return to it again and I'll do better next time.

The reasons this all has been so long in coming are several, though I must admit a fair share of the blame lies with the fact I've been comfortable with the groove of scanning all my negatives and doing all my "darkroom" work in Photoshop for presentation here an elsewhere on the web. Though everything I do when I work this way has its equivalent in the darkroom - exposure and contrast adjustments, dodging and burning, toning and spotting - I've also been anxious about my ability to achieve the same level of fine control under the enlarger. There is no undo button in the darkroom. The other thing that's been keeping me from diving right in is the fact that my equipment haul did not include everything I consider a necessity, and it was only last week with the arrival of a simple but serviceable enlarger timer that I finally had the last must-have crossed off the check list.

That's the check list for a basic level of function, but you can bet that's not the end of it. My next priority will be getting back to printing on fiber based paper followed eventually, I hope, by carbon transfer printing (not to be confused with carbon inkjet printing). That will probably be a long way off. For now I just want to get comfortable working under the enlarger and see how things go from there. As always I'll keep you posted.

Leaving the Tripod at Home

I have always been a bit of a stickler about using a tripod. That might seem pretty obvious for a guy who uses a beast like a Mamiya RB67 most of the time, but it was true even back in the day when owning such a camera was a pipe dream. I had a good tripod (the Manfrotto 055 I still use to this day) before ever considering things like a second Nikon body or additional lenses. Then as now it was always the meditative approach for me. While I've always embraced my contemplative side I sometimes wonder if I let it stifle other aspects of creativity like spontaneity, novelty and whimsy. It's hard to really cut loose with a camera that's stuck to a tripod. It can be done I suppose, (think Salvadore Dali and flying cats) but why make it harder?

Hand held medium format from the Iskra folder. For compact on the go portability I think beats your typical 35mm SLR without sacrificing those big sharp 6x6 negatives, nothing beats this style of camera.

I've been giving some thought lately to what it would mean not to be so tied to a tripod all the time. At other times in my life, when the kids were younger and in my wedding photography career, an overwhelming majority of the photography I was doing was almost the polar opposite of the kind of work I do these days and the Manfrotto was seeing some serious closet time. It's not that I'm thinking of returning to that kind of photography. Wedding photography and having young kids are two things I enjoyed and that I am so done with now. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean I have to accept the limitations of a tripod, not all the time.

In a previous entry When The Tourists Are Away... I wondered if I'd have made out a little better going tripod free with a 35mm camera. Well I did get a chance to make a return visit, this time packing two Nikons - an F80 loaded with Ilford Delta 100 and an FE with some expired Fuji Superia for colour. Also along was the Iskra folder. Going handheld doesn't mean I have to give up medium format after all.

What looked like a toy fence, coming up to about mid shin on me, would have been chest high absent the snow.

The results you can see so there's little need to comment. It was a different sort of day that my earlier visit, generally overcast with an occasional opening in the clouds letting through direct sun. The landscape had also changed in the intervening weeks, with much more snow that in many cases covered over the glassy coating of ice that formed as mist froze. On the other hand it gave the whole scene more of a winter wonderland feel.

The experience I have to say was mixed. On the positive side yes there were shots I probably wouldn't have been able to catch with a camera bound to a tripod, especially in a few cases where there were people in the shot who would have moved on if I didn't have the ability to bring the camera right up and fire. The freedom to explore a subject also came into play now and then as well. It wasn't so much the small adjustments that sometimes need to be done to get the camera positioned in exactly the right spot, I can do this just as well, if not better, when working from a tripod. It's more those situations I'm not sure of such as when it appears an awkward or impossible camera position is required, or that presents compositional challenges there might or might not be a solution for. In short if, it seems there's a good chance the effort to get the shot I envision could be in vain, the added difficulty of having to manhandle a tripod through the process might keep me from trying in the first place.

I once had a summer job at a hotel not far from these. Amazing how many people arrive for the first time expecting a rustic cabin and thinking Niagara Falls was located in a wilderness preserve. In reality it aspires to become the Las Vegas of the North. It seems people don't gamble away their savings like they used to though, which I'm informed is a bad thing.

I have to say though, shooting like this did make me lazy, lazy enough not to bother digging out a filter if I thought it would help, lazy enough that there were occasions where I chose not to take the shot rather than go to the bother of swapping lenses between the two Nikons. Arguably if I couldn't be bothered it wasn't worth the effort or the wasted film anyway, but I just wasn't as invested in the subject or the process and it\s hard to tell myself that's a good thing. And lest it be forgotten, a tripod is more than just the camera gear equivalent a hair shirt meant to heighten our awareness of the photographic process through penance. Even at shutter speeds above the 1/focal length rule of thumb, hand held camera shake can cause enough sharpness loss to erase the benefits of using a top notch lens.

It's all food for thought. It may need some time to digest though, so it's a bit soon to say whether any of this will change the way I do things in the end. I'm certainly not ready to shelve the tripod or the Mamiya, though I can't help but think some tweak may be in order. As always I'll keep you posted.

Budget Time Travel: A Photographer's Guide

The surface of Lake Erie, February 2015. Perhaps if one were to visit this exact spot in another two million years or so it would look quite similar, with sand and rock standing in for the snow and ice seen here.

If you've been following this blog for any length of time you'll know I belong to that large group of photographers for whom location and subject are usually one and the same thing. In order to have some measure of variety in our work travel is a virtual requirement, though for myself and others with similar restrictions on time and finances this need not involve a globe trotting lifestyle.

As I was in the midst of shooting the images featured in today's episode, my mind as usual wandering a different landscape than my body, it occurred to me a photographer could bring similar variety to their portfolios if we could travel in time rather than space, zooming into the future and watching the landscape change around them. Seasons would pass before our hypothetical photographer's eyes, bringing a lifetime worth of change in only minutes. They might grab a few shots as whatever apocalypse eventually befalls us all passes by in time lapse quick time then watch as the forces of climate and geology transform the landscape, perhaps turning a sea-side vista into a desert.

White on white subject matter in not particularly contrasty light made for some pretty flat looking negatives. On the light table the last negative taken on a previous day on the left and the shot taken just previously to the above image above on the right, side by side on the same negative strip. Contrast is fairly easy to adjust in a scan but it should be interesting to see what it takes to print this in the darkroom.

I do travel through time of course - forward only at the rate of one minute per minute like everyone else. I might hope for epoch spanning powers, but alas yet another Christmas has come and gone and once again no Tardis under the tree for me. But if the ability to zoom back and forth through time still eludes me there are times and places where nature transforms a landscape so rapidly as to present the illusion of the passage of geological ages in the course of just days or weeks. Though such occasions often follow in the wake of floods, volcanic eruptions or other such disasters, the trigger may be as benign as a change of seasons. And if you're lucky enough to live by one of the Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie (the shallowest and therefore first to freeze) all it takes is the onset of a solid winter.

In a way this is really the third installment in an unplanned series that started with Embracing the Elements and A Follow Up Visit. The images are from my second follow-up visit made in the first week of February. The location once again is my usual lake shore stomping grounds which, somewhat ironically perhaps, was once the site of a popular summer resort. It's where I go when I don't have much time and don't feel inspired enough to look for something new to photograph.  As you can imagine, under normal circumstances it's getting hard to find anything fresh to photograph, but a winter like this transforms it into a whole new location. A few weeks of cold weather is all it takes to transform my sea side vista into a desert landscape so long as you don't mind the fact the ground is covered by snow instead of sand. (Actually, in a whipping wind with temperatures in the -15^oC neighbourhood, I did mind just a little.)

A shot from the Nikon F80 equipped with a Tamron SP 20-40mm lens and a yellow filter. I didn't have much choice about the filter as it, along with the red filter I attached the Mamiya's 50mm Sekor lens, wouldn't budge once I screwed it on until I got home and everything warmed back up. 

Equipment wise I brought my usual RB67 kit, this time bringing my Nikon F80 sporting a Tamron 20-40mm zoom as a side arm. Obviously I'm not using the Nikon enough as the roll of Ilford Delta 100 I managed to finish that day bore a few family photos that were obviously taken last summer. By the sound of things its built in auto-wind motor was obviously struggling in the cold, and doubly so on the rewind, but it soldiered on admirably and the resulting negatives were none the worse for it. The cold also affected the film back on the RB67 as the mechanism became sluggish resulting in its failure to register that the film had been wound meaning the double-exposure prevention had to be overridden. Of course this meant I had to pay careful attention to avoid double-exposures or accidentally skipping over frames. Not the easiest thing for me. As we've seen, my mind wanders.

There will probably be more winter photography to come over the remaining weeks. The replacement spot meter arrived today (see the previous post if you missed it) and I have some time off over the next couple of days to try it. I also have hopes that some of winter's more unique conditions will coincide with a time I'm free to get out there with a camera. It has to happen sooner or later. Still, if it so happens I don't squeeze off another shot until spring I can comfort myself with the thought that this year already winter isn't another season I let get away.

A Spot Meter's Epitaph

Ah Spot, we hardly knew ye. I had hopes that by the time I sat down to write this it wouldn't be a eulogy for another beloved gadget gone to camera equipment heaven, but alas let's all bow our heads. While I haven't mentioned it previously, about a month ago, on the outing I wrote about in Embracing the Elements, my Pentax Spotmeter V suddenly stopped giving readings, each press of the trigger button resulting in only a small deflection of the needle in the opposite direction of the reading scale. Fresh batteries didn't help and in any case the battery check showed there was power with either the old or new set. When I got home I pulled it appart but after several sessions of poking around looking for loose connections, shaking and blasting canned air to flush out debris that might be shorting connections and spraying with contact cleaner, no dice.

I managed to finish that days shooting by guesstimating exposures based on experience and the readings I had been getting up until the meter gave up the ghost, the resulting negatives appearing no worse for it. Since then I have been operating with my second meter, a Gossen Luna-Lux. While its simple over/under LED indicator is less refined than its more sophisticated Lunasix and Luna-Pro cousins, it's accurate and I can't recall a time when I wasn't able to get good exposures using it. I used it exclusively on the day I wrote about in my previous post and had no exposure issues. In fact on the outing I wrote about in A Follow Up Visit I used no meter at all, relying solely on my experience with the old Sunny 16 Rule, again without any bad exposures. 

But despite all this success without the Pentax, at least in terms of exposure determination, the current situation is something I can only regard as a temporary work-around. Accurate though the Gossen may be, and as handy as its option to switch between incident and reflected metering is, it's not a spot meter. 

Here is where I should pause as I don't want to take my reader's knowledge of metering too much for granted, especially when it comes to something as old-school as using hand-held meters. Briefly then, straight-up reflected metering will be familiar to many as the method used with the built-in metering in cameras, at least before the days of computerized evaluative scene analysis. It simply looks at all the light coming from the scene and gives you the exposure settings that will render it all as an average brightness scene. Adjustments may need to be made for scenes that should appear more or less than average brightness such as a snowy landscape or coal pile. Doing reflective readings with a hand-held meter can be even more challenging since all you can do is point it in the general direction of the scene where readings may be skewed by things that don't appear in the scene as seen through the viewfinder. 

Incident metering allows you to base your exposure on the amount of light it reads falling on to your subject, a simple and brilliant method as there is no need to account for how light or dark the subject itself is. For a guy who does primarily landscape type work however it's usually not possible to go to where my subject is to measure the light, so unless I'm confident the light is exactly the same where I'm standing it may not be possible to get a meaningful reading this way. 

The view through the Pentax Spotmeter V. The circle above the 11
on the exposure scale indicates the area that the meter reads from.

Spot meters are really just very discriminating reflected meters, having their own viewfinders with a smallish circle in the middle that indicates the actual area the meter is measuring. In the case of the Pentax Spotmeter V the area measured roughly equates to what you'd see through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera equipped with a 2400mm lens (something that would probably be more accurately described as a telescope.) Most other hand-held meters I'm aware of are roughly the same. In addition to the hand-held variety however, many more modern cameras include a spot metering option with their built-in meters, which I imagine would include many 35mm SLRs new enough to have autofocus as well as, of course, all but the most basic DSLRs and those rangefinder-like lensless digital jobbies. Whatever the case the ability to measure just a small portion of the scene being photographed allows a photographer to, for example, pick out one small area of the scene with average brightness and base their exposure on this knowing that nothing else in the viewfinder is skewing the readings. Taking it one step further they could also take a few readings from different parts of the scene, say the lightest and the darkest parts, then chose an exposure that ensures both ends of the scale will stay within the films exposure range. Add a few more conceptual details and you have Ansel Adams's famous Zone System. 

I cut my teeth on the Zone System, at least once I started to fall in love with black and white work. Specifically it was the version I learned from The Zone VI Workshop by the late Fred Picker. (The Zone System, for those of you not acquainted, makes use of Roman numerals, so that reads "The Zone Six Workshop.) I don't know if the way I go about things these days still qualifies me as a user of the Zone System. Dedicated practitioners may turn their noses up at the subjective loosey-goosey way I go about determining personal film speed (box speed is usually perfect with the acutance developers I favour) and developing times (start with the Massive Dev Chart recommendation and adjust to taste), I still use it conceptually to determine exposures when shooting however, and so long as I have the other variables controlled it doesn't let me down. And using the Zone System, in practical terms, really demands the use of a spot meter. 

But while a spot meter gets me reliable results, would they be any less reliable if I used other methods? Others may dispute this, but it's always been my experience that, saving for demanding high-contrast situations, with black and white film there is a range of exposures which could be considered equally correct in terms of the final results that can be obtained without heroic measures in the darkroom. It's not hard to hit that range most of the time without any meter at all, virtually always with a simple reflected meter as a sanity check. If you add the fact that its also possible for me to use incident metering in most situations I find myself in, it would be really quite rare for me to get an exposure using a spot meter that wouldn't have been just as good if I'd used something less specialized or even no meter at all. Compared to the number of exposures I lose for other reasons (most commonly cock ups resulting from the odd little quirks three of the four RB67 backs I own have) I might do well to worry more about those things and less about metering. 

Still, as I write these words there's another Pentax Spotmeter V that I found at a decent price on eBay on its way to me. Why bother if I could do just as well without it? I think it comes down to a sense of control. Having absorbed the Zone System zeitgeist I can't help thinking in those terms no matter what I'm shooting with or using to measure light levels. I know, for example, that that rock over there has a certain value relative to those clouds up there regardless of whether I have a spot meter to measure it. Just trusting that it'll all work out in the final image bugs me even if, in the end, I would have set the camera to f/11 at 1/30th of a second in any case. I still enjoy shooting this way, just not as much. I hope that package comes soon.