The film project, an update

The plan was simple. Get out and expose a roll of film every week throughout 2026. I was thinking black and white, mostly long exposures, done along the rivers. Something moving, something still, because that's the secret sauce for long exposures. Develop the film 2 rolls at a time, since the Black, White, and Green developer does two rolls on a batch.

If you do the math that comes out to 52 rolls of film in a year, or 416 photos. Yes, 8 photos a roll, using a Fujica GW690 first generation. This is a completely manual camera. No batteries, no exposure meter, no autofocus, no auto load or rewind, no computer interpreting the scene for you. You can read about the first year with the camera here. 

I'm not sure how many rolls I've put through the camera since I bought it about 4 years ago, but guess it's a bit less than 100. I suppose if I really had to I could pull out the storage binders and count. Another time, maybe. What I really like about carrying it around is the conversations I have with other people about it, and film photography in general. One guy recognized it in the dark at 10 feet as I was working the Spolumbos scene below.

I'm getting better at setting focus and exposure, so I don't ruin a lot of shots that way. I was hoping to end up with 400 in focus, well exposed photos of something. From there, edit down to the ones where that something is interesting, and then take them into the darkroom and do some prints. 

So during the ramble with Sean last weekend he asked how it was going, since the year is half over. (How can that be?) Well, if I was on track I'd have about 26 rolls of film developed. In fact, roll 13 went into the camera during that ramble, and there's a couple frames left. I really should get out and expose them.

So technically speaking I'm at half my target. But that's all it was, a target. I could take the camera out and expose the last frames in a few minutes, but what would that get me? I'm at least trying to get interesting photos that have something in common, with the idea they'll go in a book or series of prints. I'd rather end the year with 200 photos that make me think about which are good and belong together, than have 400 where I can eliminate 200 right off without needing to think about it. I don't mind spending some money on film and developer, but I don't want to waste it.

Which films, you ask? Mostly Delta 100 or Acros II. I started with Acros when I bought the camera, but then I couldn't get it for a while so I switched to Delta 100. I like how both look. The big advantage for Delta 100 in home developing is that it dries flat. Acros is better for long exposure work because reciprocity failure isn't as much of an issue. I've got a page in my notebook with reciprocity compensation times for Delta 100, and I mostly have the workflow nailed down.

To wit, find a scene that captures my attention. I suppose I should unpack that a bit. Something about the light, or the composition, or the subject tells me that might be a good photo. Reflections almost always catch my eye. It's hard to describe, I just know it when I see it. 

Then the fun starts. Set up the camera, check composition through the viewfinder. I usually have to find something vertical to get the focus right because it's a rangefinder. I've sometimes used zone focusing. Then it's exposure. I mostly use the Viewfinder app on my phone because it gives me frame lines for that lens, and compensates for the yellow and ND filters. It does not give the reciprocity compensation, hence the notebook. Advance the film, do a last check of the composition, focus, lens settings for shutter and aperture, hope the light hasn't changed dramatically, set the countdown timer on the phone, click the shutter and phone, and wait for however long is needed. It might be 10 seconds, or 5 minutes, but is usually around 1 minute. Cover the lens with a hat, and move shutter speed from T to something else, then back again. For whatever reason, the lens makes a quiet, satisfying click doing this, where a normal exposure is a fairly loud ping.

So what images have been captured in the last little while? Here's a sampler. All of these grabbed my eye. Some of them have been blogged on my personal blog so regular readers might remember seeing them before. If you'd like to become a regular reader and want me to add you to the blog notification list so you don't miss anything, either comment below, or send an email to keith@nucleus.com.

1. From a walk along the Bow near downtown.

2. Coming out of Fish Creek during an evening walk.

3. Another part of Fish Creek.

4. Highway 22 over the Bow River.

5. Coming out of a darkroom exhibit in Crawlspace. I worked the exposure on this very carefully, wanting the building front lit by the floodlights, some texture in the road, and the rest dark.

6. During a walk in the Inglewood bird sanctuary. It actually is a long exposure because I was too lazy to take the ND filter off the camera.

7. Fish Creek between bridge 2 and 3 during the rains earlier this year.

8. The Bow River underneath Glenmore trail.

The two noir detectives

There's two stories here, the one that actually happened, and the one in my imagination.

The actual story starts here with some almost abstract images done in B&W. Those grew out of some images Michelle had seen. That was a really fun session. Our friend Antje was there during a video call to review the photos, and wanted in on the action. 

From there I started thinking about other dark and shadowy images, plus watching The Maltese Falcon, and that's what led to the noir detective look. Both loved the idea, and we started playing with it. My first thoughts were to start by playing with light, going from the high contrast abstract images in those first three blog posts, and working towards portraits with more conventional lighting, sort of channeling Karsh or Beaton. I'd done lots of photos of Michelle, so I knew a portrait would be easy. The hard part is choosing which emotions for her to show the camera. I'd taken lots of photos of Antje in the course of various activities, but never an actual posed portrait, so I didn't know how that would go.

Telling Michelle a story helps her get in the mood and project an emotion for the camera. We've done this with some of our other sessions. Our Black, White, and Red session here is an example, and that leads to others. 

Here's the story my imagination produced.

So these two tough detectives walk into my photo studio. At first I was terrified, thinking someone had hired them to investigate me to within an inch of my life. The senior one said she had just hired a new partner, since something unspeakable happened to her last one, and don’t ask. She had been convinced she needed photos of them to create a website. The boss was old school, tough as nails, and cynical because she had seen it all. To her, photos were what brought down the dirty rotten scoundrel who had cheated on his wife. She had never really thought about photos of herself. The other was younger, trying to present a more modern image to the profession, while bringing a bit of a twist on what she saw as the tired old look. I could tell she’d been around the block a few times, but hadn’t found a body in the gutter. They wanted to choose from a variety of photos, some B&W, some colour. I was told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t use a cigarette or anything to do with booze as a prop, and don't ask why. Her look gave me a chill so I didn't. I worked hard, trying to get photos that projected the image they wanted. I asked to think of various events in her career, and the memory showed on her face. She shared a few war stories, and the improbable tale of how she had met her new partner. Once I got the lighting set up, and a few trial photos taken, they could see I knew what I was doing and started to relax. Some black coffee and chocolate chip cookies later and we were all buddies. 

1. 

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

These are the sorts of images that one can spend forever editing, tweaking the various sliders and selectively editing portions of the photo. We wanted the shadows and contrast to create a mood. They did not want their skin edited to look like a teenager. After all, nobody wants to hire a teenage detective.

There more of the behind the scenes and some of the portraits will show up on my other blog. If you'd like to be notified of blog updates, please email me keith @ nucleus dot com, and ask to be put on my mailing list or leave a comment here. I post to this blog only when I've got a project I want to show. The personal blog gets updated much more often.

Calgary and the Bow in long exposure

Last week Sean and I went for a ramble along the Bow River. I was looking for long exposure reflections, so only took the GW690 along with a 10 stop ND filter, plus the usual yellow filter for Delta 100. 

I've found that if I carry both a digital and film camera, I tend to use the digital. So much of my digital photography is events where I click first and think after, so as to catch fleeting moments. Plus carrying more than one camera now is getting old and heavy. Call me a weenie if you must.

Film photography, especially medium and large format is thinking first, and getting everything right before clicking the shutter. This ramble was one of the most successful for me on that front. I remembered all the gear, and didn't make any boneheaded mistakes with or without the filter. I exposed 2 rolls, and of the 16 frames, all were in focus, were all of something, and were reasonably well exposed considering the long exposure and reciprocity failure. 

I was looking for water smooth enough to show reflections, which some of the calmer areas are already, and hopefully some cloud motion on a mostly cold and overcast day. Most exposures were f11 or f16, and around 18 to 20 seconds, with a few as long as 30 seconds or as short as 8 seconds.

And for the digital pixel peepers who might be joining us, yes, this lens has lots of detail to look at, though I'm not sure how much will show up in these jpg images. However there are (gasp!) lots of fine dust spots or tiny hairs. I removed the most noticeable ones but there's still lots more. These are all otherwise lightly edited. 

1. We started near the skipping stone bridge just in view on the right.

2. I think of this as Fort Calgary, but it's called the Confluence now. 

3.

4. Part of the skipping stone bridge. I was hoping there would be a bit more interest in the clouds.

5. We were fortunate not to twist an ankle walking on a gravel bar covered in several inches of snow to hide the big round rocks. Neither of us were wearing waterproof boots so we were reluctant to venture out onto an actual ice shelf. I was quite taken with the zig zag of the bridges. I was hoping for a bit more reflection in the water, but it was doing interesting things in the foreground.

6.

7.

8. I'll admit it. This is the composition that really caught my eye, and I paid attention to the exposure times. I'll almost certainly print this one when I do more darkroom work.

9.

10. Across the bridge and now looking south east. I was interested in the curving shadow, wanting to get some detail in the bottom of the bridge above me, and not blow out the remainder of the scene.

11. Two similar images, trying to catch the train in motion. These were 8 second exposures, since the sun had come out and it was quite a bit warmer.

12.

13. So up to there I was 12 for 12. It was getting colder again, and we were losing the light. We drove over to Prince's Island. I tried two frames of the sun and clouds doing (what I thought were) interesting things above and behind some downtown buildings. Alas, the interest didn't show up.

Sean was working the scene while I was distracted by a photoshoot taking place nearby on the ice. I like watching other photographers at work. I saw this composition with Sean framed by the circular thingie, and he waited patiently as I got the filter off. I knew this was a risky photo as this camera flares badly when pointed into the sun. I played with some editing tricks in NLP and then Lightroom, but in the end realized that it wouldn't look right for Sean to be anything but a shadow given where the sun is.

The last image was the bridge over the ice rink. It's just a boring photo, not worth the effort to edit.

As I said, I'm really pleased how the day turned out. I took my time looking for compositions I found interesting, and said no to a bunch of images that weren't quite it, or involved me standing in the river. There were several compositions I was unable to capture with the camera at hand, and I knew perfectly well would have been nice given a different lens. I tried to be methodical as I took the light readings and calculated reciprocity. I miss Acros II. 

A couple days later I developed both rolls. I use a Black, White, and Green developer. (details here.) It's a liquid the consistency of cough syrup, with a long shelf, and it can be poured down the drain afterward. The develop time is 13 minutes for Delta 100, and I suspect I used a much shorter time with some earlier rolls. I'm not sure if they look a bit thin because I erred on exposure time, or on development time. 

Not sure when I'll get the dark room going again, but I hope soon. Stay tuned.

Winter Darkroom

This post will be picking up where my first darkroom post left off. That was mid January, and if you need to remind yourself of where we are, you can find it here. 

The cSpace exhibit went really well! A ton of people showed up during our gala night. Several people said it was the most people they'd seen at an opening at cSpace. I think the reason for that is that for most artists, a gallery opening will attract their family and friends, plus the people who somehow follow their work. For most of us, that's not a particularly big crowd. Here's an iPhone photo of that night.

But for our exhibit, there were 30 photos, so we got that group times 30 or so, plus the people going out to Exposure Festival events in general, plus people interested in darkroom printing. Even the other times I went, I wasn't alone. I baby sat the SAIT darkroom video on a Saturday afternoon. I was a bit surprised there was a steady stream of people wandering through. Here's a link to the documentary about the SAIT darkroom, 50 years of operation and counting, here. I appear in it, very very briefly.

Yes, I know those who couldn't attend in person, or haven't been following along here or here, want to know which photo I put into the exhibit.

That second photo illustrates the problem of taking photos of a photograph. The paper itself is somewhat reflective, as is the glass if it's framed. So the photo of my image has a faint selfie to add another layer. 

There's been a few negative images that I've digitized and then later printed in the darkroom. Often I prefer the print. For some I've then tried to digitize the print with the thought of sharing an image of the print itself. So far this has not been entirely satisfactory.

Those that have been following along know that on my other blog I do an image of the month and an image of the year. The selection process is somewhat erratic, and involves a lot of dithering and second thoughts. And third, and so on. The same was true for this, trying to come up with a nice print from a film photo. I had done many prints of Linda sitting in the chair with Celina, (it's in the first blog link above) trying to get it right. I'm pretty pleased with it, but in the end I went with the reflection photo above. 

I got sidetracked with other things for a while, but I was back in the dark room last week, working on some prints from an Elbow Falls ramble with Sean. I spent lots of time looking at the little falls I talk about here, and exposed a roll of Delta 100 in my medium format GW690. These falls are quite the challenge to capture, given the dark rocks, deep shadows, and the bright water highlights, all in a long exposure photo. And then translating that onto paper. I was quite disappointed that the negative of some water texture that I particularly like has a faint hair embedded in the film. I'll have another go using a different crop and see what I think.

But the one I was most interested was from a very short walk in Carburn park during the brutally cold weather earlier this year. I was coming back from a visit with a buddy and stopped to see what the mist coming off the Bow River was like, even though I wasn't really dressed for it. That didn't work out, and I was heading back to the car at a brisk walk. There's a little bridge that I quite like. The reflections from it can be quite lovely, and I've used the bridge to pose people. Even though I was freezing my butt off, and everything else, the light on the bridge was was amazing. I didn't take long to compose and click.

You're going to see several version of that print. Here's the zoomed out view, propped up against some lovely flowers given to us by some friends over for an evening. I might try taking photos of prints using this idea, but with a piece of black mat board as the support. Hmmm. 

I love this print, and want to work with it more. I didn't do anything for this, just a 1.5 second exposure. I'm thinking about doing the same print with a series of contrast filters, starting from 00 and working up to 5. I haven't done much work with contrast filters, and don't have a sense of how the look of the image will change from filter to filter. I might put in an ND filter to increase the exposure time, and do some dodging and burning. That could be a whole other blog post, if I get a good way of digitizing the results.

Pay attention now, through this digression. In addition to film, I also like doing macro photos. The tiny  details that become visible can be fascinating. I'd never known that ants had hairy butts, for example. I started with using some extension tubes on a 100mmm macro lens. (here, if you're interested.) then a buddy sold me the Canon MP-E 65mm f2.8 Macro lens. (Inaugural tryout here.) And yes, as a digression within a digression, I've thought about putting that lens on my 35mm film camera. The main  problem will be finding focus, and then clicking the shutter without moving anything. The difficulties are formidable.

One of the reasons people buy cameras with ever more pixels packed into the sensor is to better resolve fine details. My digital camera has 6240 x 4160 pixels, and the newer mirrorless can double that, or more. Film is a different beast. Because of the nature of the silver halide crystals on film, you can't quite talk about resolution the same way. Then when printing in a darkroom there is the quality of the lens and the characteristics of the paper. We use a special magnifying glass to see the grain in the film so we know our print will be in focus.

I got to wondering what my macro lens would see if I took a photo of a print. Remembering previous difficulties in lighting subjects under a macro lens, I had the thought of shining a light through the print via the light source I use for digitizing negatives. Of course I realize that the light will be scattered somewhat by the paper. I'll deal with lighting from above the print another time. 

Here's another view of that print. Keep in mind the light source is about 6.25 x 8.5 inches, so the full print is not illuminated.

Here's what a tiny fraction of that image looks like under 5x macro.

When I say tiny, I'm not kidding. That photo is capturing an area about 5 mm wide by 3mm high, out of an 8x10 inch print. 

As it turns out, it seems that the MP-E lens isn't quite strong enough to see the grain. Just to go the fully Monty, so to speak, here's the same part of the image adding in 68mm of extension tubes. I've never figured out what the total magnification factor is for this combination of lens and tubes is on this camera. I suppose if I wanted to really get carried away I could use the older T6i and add in the crop factor. But I'm not going to. Just eyeballing it, I'm guessing this image is capturing an area about 2.5 by 1.5 mm. 

Here's an image of the negative, taken with 5x macro and all the extension tubes. 

Here's another trio of images, same idea, with Delta 100. These are some rocks just below the high tide line near Port Saunders, Newfoundland. I zoomed in on the rock in the lower left.

This is 1x.

This is 5x.

And yet another trio of photos. This is Acros II in 35mm format. Again, these are done by shining light through the paper. The first is with a 24-105mm lens. This is much more contrasty than the print, which shows a much smoother transition of tones. Such are the difficulties of comparing paper to a digital image. I wanted to see if I could see that transition under magnification. I generally think that film handles gradual transitions better than digital because of the slightly random structure of the silver halide crystals.

With the MP-E at 1x.

And at 5x.

Even if I were to crop in, it's pretty clear I'm not going to see the grain structure. I think that's because the grain that is so clear and sharp on the negative runs up against whatever limitations the paper itself has, plus my shining the light through the paper which would scatter the light a little, plus the possibility the enlarger was ever so slightly out of focus, plus for the bridge photo the limitations of that camera lens being hand held on a brutally cold day. The camera was on a tripod for the rocks long exposure, which leads to the possibility that it could have moved ever so slightly.

I don't think I'll try to find grain on paper again. It was fun and gave me a good idea of how much detail the paper can capture, assuming that every step along the way is done right. There's lots of ways to go wrong, but that's the challenge. When you try something difficult, you can take pride in the accomplishment. Even if it's not what you had hoped for, it's still yours, and you almost certainly learned something along the way.

I'm going to continue making prints, experimenting with different techniques, and enjoying how they come out. Not a lot of people will hold the print in their hands, or see it up on a wall, but that doesn't really matter. I'm doing this for me.

If you're new to the blog and don't want to miss the next one, just leave a comment asking to be added to the blog notification list. Or email me at keith at nucleus.com.