The sheet that has me yearning to shoot colour slides again on large format.
Blue Streak
Porth Meudwy, Aberdaron, North Wales
2.45pm 16th February 2018
Linhof Technikardan S45
Nikkor-W 210mm f/5.6
Fujichrome Velvia 50
1/2″ f/22
245mm bellows extension
5º front tilt
Home-developed with Jobo CPE-3 and Tetenal E6 (FD 7mins 10secs)
Digitized with 4-frame stitch on lightbox with D800E/85PC-E
From a trip where I wild-camped on location in the carpark. The advantage of doing this was that I could stay on location across the whole day until the sun was low, instead of having to pack up for the 4hr drive home again. I was able to watch the light change around the cove, and discover a range of different scenes and subjects across the different tide levels: this was the last subject I found I think before heading back.
This is a sheet I successfully rescued last week, one of the very few which I managed to incorrectly develop at home (I think I mixed the colour dev in the E6 incorrectly, never again!) and came out with a slide of Velvia 50 that looked like an inverted sheet of colour neg – horrid cyan cast. Happily, I managed to redit this very successfully in photoshop – and, along the way, even learning some new post-processing tips from Alex Burke’s e-book for slide (something I didn’t think I needed but learned a lot from).
And it’s making me want to shoot some more colour film on large format, maybe even 8×10!
I’d probably – at least for wider landscape views if not for intimate or macro scenes – not want to shoot Velvia, instead looking for a more contemporary look, possibly with warmed up and de-saturated Provia, or Portra 160. But if I shoot colour neg, I definitely need to up my confidence in inverting negs for a consistent result.
I’ve also recently been enjoying thinking with other contemporary large-format film photographers, such as Alex Soth and Bryan Schutmaat, and have one or two new projects lined up, both for colour and b&w. The problem is that the bigger you go with film, the more absorbing the process, so I might give 8×10 colour a go as well as B&W. I have Stearman SP810 trays as well as jobo tanks for 5×4 and smaller, so can process any size of film at home up to 8×10, so that’s not a particular issue – though I will have to run some tests with colour dev temperatures across the process with the stearman first, esp. without a temperature controlled water bath. I’m thinking thermos flasks for controlling warm water temperature, and one simple water bath for reusing the chemistry for a second batch. Fingers crossed!
