Kaylee at South Mountain

Here's a shot of Kaylee my model friend from Flagstaff. We're up halfway or so into South Mountain in Phoenix. This is my first attempt at using the Polaroid 55 in the field with the sodium sulfite solution. I've got a few kinks to work out.

First, I've got to remember to carry the plastic storage box with the sodium sulfite to the shooting site instead of leaving it in the car.

Second, I need some better storage for the SS. The cheap, plastic storage containers I bought at Walmart are...well...crap. They leak if the fluid sloshes. So now guess whose car smells distinctly of sodium sulfite?

I like this overall image of Kaylee. I'm ticked because I've got branches merging with her head. This is one of my pet peeves with my students and here I am shoving her right into the middle of some creosote bush.

The neg scanned very contrasty. The print, which I gave to Kaylee, was gorgeous. This negative is tough to scan and quite dirty. I think the dirt and some other aberrations are the result of me carrying that neg and print down to the car in my Cambo case; then immersing it into the SS.

I shot some TMAX 100 of her on this rock as well. I will process those and get back here with the results ASAP.

Finally....

Whew! I finally got the camera out and clicked a shutter. The guys at Tempe Camera Repair were awesome...or maybe they just took pity on me. But they glued my bellows back on for free. So in exchange, I promptly went upstairs and spent $200 on a new loupe, some Polaroid 55, sodium sulfite and 4x5 plastic sleeves.

Here's the first 4x5 image from our home in Gilbert. These are our patio lights in an acacia tree in our back yard. This was shot at 1 sec at f/8-11 on the fresh Polaroid 55 pos/neg film. It appears a little underexposed. I probably exposed a little too much for the light bulb rather than the shadows.

This was also my first time clearing the film with an 18 percent sodium sulfite solution and rinsed with water followed by Photo Flow. I think I may need to add some Kodak hardener to this procedure. The negative seemed soft and fragile. It's got some water spots, but overall I'm pleased with this trial.

A bump in the road

I finally found a window of opportunity to pull out the Cambo. We had a rare rain in the valley of the sun and the palms in my new backyard were holding some nice water droplets...and yes, it's a clichéd photo, but I'm still working out the kinks on the camera.

Well, I stretched the bellows to their max to get a closeup and pop! the bellows came unglued from the rear frame. My first instinct was to go get some gorilla glue and make the repair myself, but on further inspection, this may require some special clamps or equipment to get a light-tight seal.

So I'm taking this to Photomark or Tempe Camera to let the pros handle it.

In the meantime, I may shoot some more medium format stuff.

So please stand by.

Please Be Patient

We have been in the process of moving from Yuma to Gilbert, a suburb of Phoenix.

I won't be able to post images for another week or so. Thanks for visiting and please come back soon to check out my adventures.

Carlos

Cactus that I kind of like

This cactus closeup is probably one of the first images I really like out of my 4x5. It's still a little clichéd but I enjoy the overall effect. I developed this one in a tray with four other images.

I don't think I like the tray processing much. The negs seemed a little thin and there was definitely some minor scratching on the emulsion. Granted I could have increased development time to compensate for not using the drum, but I'm also too careless and anxious in the dark.

The drum seems to give me more consistent results, but I can only process two images at a time.

Just happy to waste film

Sometimes I try to use this 4x5 like I would a 35mm in that I rush to load, set up and shoot fast and with little of the forethought and planning that most large-format shooters so diligently adhere.

One of the things that keeps pegging me as the 4x5 rookie is that twice now I've burnt an open packet of unexposed sheet film. Twice I was in a hurry to load some sheets and get out the door to catch a shot when I forgot to return the foil packets to their box. Of course, I clicked on the lights to see the tell-tale purple edge and notched corner poking out of the pouches before quickly slamming off the lights.

I've been able to salvage a lot of that film. Most of the inside sheets only get an edge fog near the top. But some have a pretty severe 1/4-inch to half-inch burn.

Anybody got suggestions other than just altering my hard wiring?

Not-so-happy accident

Here's an uintentional multiple exposure. I somehow failed to adhere to the common system of using the brail-like ridges on the film holder dark slides to indicate which plates are exposed/unexposed.

So this is a photo from Castle Dome mixed with a detail of a fan palm frond. The odd thing is that the palm shot is a rare horizontal. But you can barely see it because so much of it was in shadow. It had few highlights and you can see them faintly penetrating the Castle Dome shot.

More Polaroid

So I'm really starting to believe Polly Chandler is right on target with her Polaroid advice. I'm really digging this film. I'm still using this old stuff that Jason gave me, but I really like using this pos/neg film. I'm kind of anxious to get to the Phoenix area so I can get some sodium sulfite (sulfate) and a proper container for the negatives--although, I do so enjoy my early morning coffee, NPR processing sessions with the Kodak TMax 100.

This is a cactus in our front yard, shot at f/11-16 @ 1/2 sec. I lost the light I really wanted as the sun dipped behind a cloud just before I shot the frame. I could have waited for the sun to come back, but it was already close to the horizon, so I shot this with flat light just because I had everything set up and ready to go.

This is harder than I expected

Shooting full-frame is tough. I would love to show you this negative in it's full version, but it's almost embarrassing.

Lots of things happened with this cemetary shot. I had hoped to shoot a full moon photo. I drove around the day before and noted the location of the near-full moon at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday and thought it would be in the perfect spot around 5 on Wednesday-the day of the full moon.

So on Wednesday I hustle to the cemetary to do my feaux "Moonrise Over Hernandez" interpretation and there's no moon in sight! It's not even above the horizon line. I can't believe the earth's axis changed that much in one day as to totally obscure the moon from one day to the next in a half-hour's time!

So now I'm flustered and can't wait for the moon because I've got to go get Allie from day care. So I collect myself and try to shoot a standard cemetary shot. But it's hard and I don't want to use a name on a grave marker, so I really struggled with finding a good composition in a short time. The light on the cemetary was still too hot and not what I really wanted on this shot.

I've done a quick job of burning and dodging to make this somewhat effective, but I'm going to need a lot more practice.

4x5 of KOFA Mountains

I'm never really sure what I'm looking at, but this was taken within hiking distance of Castle Dome mountain just north of the Castle Dome Mining Museum. This is an early morning view facing north of what I suspect is the KOFA National Wildlife Refuge or part of Yuma Proving Ground.

This was a pretty treacherous outing for the Cambo 4 x 5. We were positioned on a small hill. Ron was bouncing about with his Nikon D100 merrily popping off images as the sun rose. I was precariously perched on the side of the hill with the tripod legs carefully balanced mostly on loose shale or slate. I was fumbling with the dark cloth, Polaroid back, film holders, etc. as the sun rose over Castle Dome mountain.

I've got a lot to learn about landscape photography with large format.

One More from Castle Dome Mining

More medium format from Castle Dome Mining

Medium format time

Ron Watson and I took an early Saturday morning expedition and trekked out to Castle Dome area. The hour-long drive put us in the shadow of Castle Dome mountain where I shot three frames of 4 x 5 and a roll in my Mamiya RB67. We then made it to the mining museum where I knocked out another roll in the RB. I mostly metered off the top of my head, but Ron gave me some guidance by metering scenes with his D100 and then I just extrapolated to my own settings.

Here are some medium format images from the mining town.

Merydeth at coat closet

I'm am lovin' this old Polaroid film!!! This was actually underexposed in the camera and I ran the development long on the Polaroid. I don't know if that works like pushing roll film, but I gave it a shot anyway. This is 1 sec at f/5.6.

More Polaroids

Here is some more of that gooey, old Polaroid film. They kind of have a character of their own.

mixing old and new technology

Here's that same negative of Merydeth, but this time I gave it a little tweaking in Photoshop using some layering and a diffuse glow filter.

Another set of negs

This time I got Merydeth to sit for me. I've been hoping to try my hand at human subjects with this 4x5.

Trying to do extreme closeups is quite difficult given that you can't focus once you've put the film in the camera. Mery did a great job of holding still for the 30-or-so seconds it took for me to load film, set the lens and trip the shutter.

But you can see the extreme closeup has a fair amount of motion blur. Most of that is attributed to the 1/8 shutter speed.

I think I shot these at 1/8 at f/11. I need to do a better job of recording exposure data when I shoot. I guess I could go look at the camera and see what settings I left on the lens.

You can also see the cloeseup is cropped differently than 4x5. I think I misloaded the film in the holder and about half an inch of film was not exposed.

Next go 'round with the 4x5

Here's some driveway art from Allie and our neighbor Kylee. This is one of the two negatives described developing in the previous post. This negative had a couple of small emulsion tears. On this image they were easy to patch. If this had been a portrait or something similar the holes could have been a problem.

The overall exposure looks pretty good. Density seems adequate. I shot one photo of Kylee drawing but I'm not happy with that composition. I'm ready to shoot some portraits now.

What's old is new again

I dug a little deeper into my old darkroom stash and pulled out a Chromega 8x10 developing drum. My parents bought this thing for me when I was a freshman in high school (let's call it the late '70s).

I'm typing just as my next two 4x5 negatives are running through the fixer cycle. In fact I'm going to run and change the fixer now. Pardon me a minute....

So this Chromega drum has some discreet slots molded inside the tube. You can very delicately slide two 4x5 negs into this thing and they seem very tenuously held into place. This is the first time I've used this drum for negatives.

I got it back in the '70s when I first started making Cibachrome prints.

In another minute, I'll go wash these negs and see if they fell out of their slots or if I got a good development from the drum.

For my own recording this again is TMax 100 developed in D-76 at 70 degrees. The timer was set to 6 minutes and I pulled the tube off the motor at 5:50. Rinsed and fixed and washed normally....

The negs are drying now. A cursory visual inspection seems to indicate they developed well--although one of the negs had moved out of the slot somewhere in the processing stage. It didn't seem to hurt the neg that I can tell just yet.

I'll scan soon and post the results.

D76 Popsicle

Oh yeah, Julie's ratting me out.

In the middle of the chasing around to move the film from the drum to the trays, I forgot I had left a beaker of D76 in the freezer while trying to bring it closer to 68 degrees.

About three hours later, Julie finds a frozen beaker of developer with a thermometer sticking out of it. I never knew you could freeze this stuff.

Second TMax image

This is a slightly more massaged image than the bicycle photo. This is the second frame I shot on Saturday at Bill's house during my first round of shooting with TMax 100 sheet film.

This one is slightly cropped and rotated with a fair amount of burning and dodging. It was windy and I kept waiting for the sunlight to fall on the tip of the agave, unfortunately I didn't see the sun also hitting the top, right corner of the image. Plus, I didn't frame it properly and the shutter in the background was slightly off horizon.

Again this is f/11 at 1/4 second. So I see some slight motion blur, but overall I'm please with my first round of images. These are nothing to hang in a gallery, but I feel good about not making a total flameout from my first go-round with sheet film.

I may be in Phoenix on Monday and might go get some more Polaroid film and try to experiment with that in the coming weeks.

First TMax image

This is my first official photo from a TMax negative. There was only a fair amount of adventure getting to this point.

I shot this with little problem, but wasn't entirely happy with the overall composition and content, but still I was eager to burn a sheet of film and get a little experience with the camera and the film holders. So I shot this and an agave leaf in front of Bill Butler's house on Saturday afternoon. Both exposures were f/11 at 1/4 sec.

The drama occured Sunday morning as I got up around 6 so I could make coffee and process my two sheets.


On Saturday, Bill had graciously brought me some D-76 and an Omega drum roller base from San Diego for me to use with my Unicolor 8x10 drum.

So I loaded the drum Sunday morning enjoying my coffee while listening to NPR. It was a great morning with cool fall weather lingering in Yuma which I enjoyed while moving between the kitchen to patio to darkroom.

So I prepared to leisurely sip coffee and listen to the puzzlemeister Will Shorts while spinning the drum and its chemicals. Unfortunately as I filled the drum with a water pre-bath, all the fluid immediately leaked out. It seems the gasket on the Unicolor drum is toast. I made a dash to the laptop and bumped Julie off so I could find the development time for tray processing.

I then frantically grabbed trays, poured in some D-76 (room teperature) and did my best to get the two 4x5 sheets from the drum to the D-76 without mangling them.

The tray developing process was fairly uneventful, but I forgot to pull my negative early because I knew the developer was warmer than 68 degrees and I also could not see the timer in the dark. I rely on its beep to notify me of time run out.

But I successfully tray-processed the two negatives with little (if no) scratches. And here is the first scan from that event.

It's a little contrastier than I like. I think that's due to the longish development in the warm D76. But overall I'm pleased with the process and am deeming this a successful first try.

First Photo

This is the first official photo from the Cambo 4x5 since I officially took possession from Jason Hitesman. This was shot on Polaroid 55 pos/neg film. It's very, very old film. That explains the streaking and general gooey-ness of the image. It was scanned on my Canon 9950 flatbed at around 600 ppi to a file size of 64 mb.

Stay tuned. My TMax 100 film just showed up today. I'm not sure there's time to play with the camera AND process a sheet of film today, but I may sneak it in late tonight.