5 Frames with Three Cameras in the Woods

For this 5 Frames, we’re going to a small suburban forest with mostly Aspen and Oak trees and lots of paths. Athough there are loads of birds and other animals there, I come for the plants. The forest is peaceful and you can do your thing as slowly as you want, just maybe not in summer as the mosquitos can be bad. I’ve used all of my cameras in here for different reasons.

I don’t have a good scanner, so these are all prints, 5×7 and up, on Ilford multigrade RC or fibre-based paper. I developed them in either Dektol or E72 and toned them with dilute (1:20) Kodak selenium toner, to get rid of the green hue. Finally, I rephotographed them with my phone (Pixel 7) and did very slight touch up – B&W conversion and some cropping. Try as I might, not all of these re-photos turned out as sharp as I’d like but I assure you that the originals are.

The first one was taken with a Canon A1 and 28 mm f/2.8n lens, on Ilford HP5+. I use mainly DD-X (1+4) for HP5+ in 35 mm, because it’s a terrific combination that handles many situations very well – and that’s what I used here (8 min, 20°C for developing). With this camera, I just use the built-in meter and don’t usually recall the settings. It’s printed on a 5×7 sheet of RC deluxe paper from Ilford. The trees are very thin and closely spaced here so you get the feeling of being a flea on a dog in a Gary Larson panel. I wish I had an even wider lens. Even though Aspen photography has been done before (!) I still like it.

Although I like this next photograph, I feel the scene has much more potential than this. It needs some fog or snow, and maybe some crows, or an owl? I saw it again recently, and it does look better in winter (it’s often flooded or boggy in summer which makes it hard to put your stuff down anywhere). Fog was really common last winter, but somehow always when I was at work, so the waiting continues. I used an Intrepid 4×5 with a 90 mm Angulon lens late in the fall. Not the Super Angulon, but the older Angulon f/6.8. This is a really sharp lens when set up properly, but there’s only a tiny bit of room for error and if the two standards aren’t exactly parallel you can’t focus to infinity. This is frustrating because then you can’t focus through the scene to get it all bang on. But when you do… wow! A recessed lens board solved this issue completely. Some people fret over this lens’s coverage and clearly you’re not going to get much rise/fall, but for landscapes I don’t mind so much. In return you get a tiny, light lens that’s sharp and fits all the filters you probably already have (40.5 mm).

I exposed at 1/10 sec, f/22 on Fomapan 400 metered at 200 ASA with a Sekonic (incident reading). I developed this one in D-23 stock (7.5 min) just to try it out with Foma 400. Today I would probably use Rodinal 1+50.

For the next photo I waited for a clear blue sky and wind. I wanted to catch the leaves blowing off the trees against a black sky. I just wish there had been more leaves! Or bigger leaves? You can really hardly see them at all – they look like dust – but I still like the photo. This was done with a Plaubel Makina 6×7, hand-held, loaded with Rollei RPX 25, and I used a red filter to get the sky as dark as possible. The lens was probably at f/4 or less but I didn’t record it – it’s a really good lens even wide open at f/2.8. I developed it in Ilford Perceptol, a D-23 clone, and it turned out more or less how I wanted, just with fewer blowing leaves. Since the photo was a bit of a fail, let’s talk about the film. I don’t love it. When I bought it, I did no research at all thinking that RPX25 was a rebranded Agfa APX 25, but it’s not, and I had bought 5 rolls to save on shipping. A slow film like that should have tiny grain in almost any developer, but I don’t see any improvement over many faster films. It’s hard to control the contrast, as you can see, and it curls like crazy – and it costs slightly more than PanF, which would be my next choice.

This long grass makes a fantastic foreground. In the spring it’s often wet with dew, as it is here, and really richly textured. In the fall it turns golden and maybe looks even better. I stumbled on this scene by accident while revisiting old locations and as soon as I saw it I knew I would like it. The grass was a healthy green and covered in dew and there was no wind! I had accidentally ordered a box of Fomapan 100 sheet film (instead of 400), so this was a good place to try it out. The exposure was 1/8 sec at f/45 using a 150 mm lens. No filter. I processed the sheet in Rodinal (1+50) for 9 minutes and then printed on Ilford MGFB paper. Nothing wrong with Fomapan 100.

The last shot was a test. I had just bought an inexpensive 90 mm Schneider Angulon lens that was a Linhof selection. It’s the same lens I used for the clearing shot. It has an older Synchro Compur shutter – the one with the shutter speeds of one-fifth instead of one quarter, one tenth instead of one eighth etc. I had it adjusted and lubricated as soon as I got it. To try it out I just wanted a complex scene, and here it is. By luck I had the two standards exactly parallel (an issue that would plague me later) and this negative is stunningly sharp.

I often forget that many of my favourite images were taken quite close to home.

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