Withlacoochee Project Part 1

I started a project over the weekend that I am simply calling the "Withlacoochee Project." I am taking 8x10 photos along the Withlacoochee River, and I would like to end up with at least 20-40 contact prints total. I will also be doing Van Dyke Browns and possibly cyanotypes along with silver prints. Here is the first batch of negatives. I used either my Schneider Symmar-S 210mm or Wollensak 159mm (I also am republishing one from last week). They are all brown toned in PS to simulate a Van Dyke Brown. These were all taken at Langdale Park, but I'm planning on going to a variety of places for this:

On the street with my 8x10

Went out tonight to shoot some x-ray film for fun during First Friday in downtown Valdosta. Things weren't very lively but I did find a couple shots. First off is a bike that was shimmering in the last light of the day on a street corner. I used my Schneider Symmar-S 210mm wide-open at f/5.6 and 1/60, with a bit of front swing, developed in Rodinal 1:100 for 7 minutes. Lost a little shadow detail (I rate this film at 50) due to the high contrast. I haven't gotten a good N-1 development strategy for this film yet. I probably should rate it at 25 and develop for 6 minutes instead. Maybe I'll try that next time. Anyway, here is the shot:

Next is a shot of the Dosta Playhouse. The exposure was f/45 and 4 seconds. Some folks were walking past so they turned into ghostly figures:

Finally, I used my Wollensak 159mm for a shot of the Odafe Trio, some friends of mine who play at a local coffeeshop every First Friday. I didn't have any fast film so the exposure, even wide-open, came out to 8 seconds. I also used a friend's camera to flash them during the shot but that didn't really help to stop motion - not powerful enough. I might have to redo this with some 400 speed film and a real flash:

Also, I took a couple of portraits of my girlfriend yesterday. Here is the better one. This is a Schneider Symmar-S 300mm at f/11:

More portraits and a couple 8x10 sheets

I finally got around to finishing up these portrait scans. These are the shots I mentioned in a recent post that were really underexposed but saved by using Acufine developer. Both were taken with my converted Polaroid and 135mm Xenotar lens.

First is a shot of a dancer. I made a dumb mistake and had my meter set to 3200 ISO, instead of 100. This was an egregious error, a 5-stop underexposure. Despite this, the negative was usable but not great:

I was still working with Acufine to figure out how best to utilize it. With a little more experimentation I took this negative that was also underexposed by 4 stops and it looks almost normal. On the Acufine packaging it mentions to not agitate too much. I don't know the mechanics of why this matters, but I found that simply setting the negative in the developer and only agitating slightly at first and then at 30 minutes worked perfectly (a total of 1 hour in the developer). Here is the result:

I printed it in my darkroom tonight and it came out pretty well. It's not perfect but better than nothing.

I also had time this past weekend to shoot some 8x10 sheets. Here are the results. I shot my typical green-sensitive x-ray film. This first shot was with a Wollensak 159mm super-wide angle lens:

This one was shot with a Gundlach Triple-Convertible lens that is a 12" lens with both elements or either a 21" or 28" lens with the individual elements. This one was at 12":

Still simply learning about this x-ray film and its properties. 8x10 is fun to shoot just for kicks. That is probably strange but at the end of the day the per-sheet cost of this x-ray film is only $0.25, much less than my standard 4x5 film, so it's great not to worry so much about costs!