It was the suggestion by an acquaintance on Twitter that had me reaching for my Nikon F.5 and macro zoom. It has been a very long time since I hefted this brick of a camera and lens combination to my eye to make images. In that time, my 35mm film stock has gone from fresh to very out of date. Where have the fresh years gone?
The thought of looking at large subjects and small detail had my imagination in a spin with ideas. I needed to slow down and think - but I didn’t! I ran with all the ideas, poking my lens here and there in a scatter gun approach, in the hope that it would provide me with some interesting pictures.
Even with a very itchy shutter finger, it was time to take a deep breath, slow the heart rate and enter the creative zone. Macro photography can be quite tricky with its very narrow depth of field. Getting the point of focus right can, in some cases, mean just a knife edge’s worth of refinement. Small aperture (large F number) settings play an important part in increasing the area of sharpness, along with hyperfocal distance. The good thing about film cameras is you can check what is in focus by pressing the shut down button on the camera body, or, in the case of my Bronica, the lens.
Macro photography is not just about what is in focus. Undoubtedly, this is where the eye will be drawn to first, so it is important to get it right. However, you should also give consideration to what is in soft focus and the patterns of those areas. It is the combination of all these focus points which combine to make a good photograph.
I surprised myself with the number of frames that looked interesting as the wet negatives were hung up to dry. What is more extraordinary, and something I have taken for granted, is that this is the first time I have used HC 110 with Agfaphoto APX 100 @ISO 100. I chose to use a dilution of 1+31 for 6 mins at 22 C. I had no choice really - it had been swelteringly hot for days, making it difficult to reduce the temperature of the water and it was too hot to argue. It has provided me with a toned set of negatives that look very fine grained. All I need now is a break in the weather so I can print them in the darkroom.
A few days later, the heavens opened, the clouds banged together as the rain fell from the sky and the ground sighed with relief, producing that delightful aroma of damp that pervades the air after a hot spell.
The darkroom was scented with the smell of freshly diluted chemicals after its summer clean. Which negatives should I print first? Six of the thirty six took my eye straight away, so I made them the focus of this printing session. I chose Fotospeeds RCVC paper. The contact print I had made earlier with this paper showed that the negatives had normal contrast, which in my case is in the region of grade three. The segmented test prints were where I had expected them to be at around twenty seconds. Things were moving along really well and time and several cups of tea slipped along.
When I am having a good printing session I do not normally like to change makes of paper or size as it upsets the rhythm of the process. This time, however, I did because I was so taken by the photographs of the peaches in the dappled light. I increased the paper size to 9.5 x 12 and pulled out some FB warmtone by Ilford. When using these papers, time slows down and everything takes longer. The only thing that stayed the same was the grade set at three.
Thanks to Jason’s suggestion, it has reignited my interest in 35mm again.
Technical data:
Nikon F.5 with Tamron 80-210 zoom macro lens, Film Agfa APX 100 at box,developed in Kodak HC 110, Scanned from prints made on Fotospeed RCVC and Ilford warmtone Mk 4 FB gloss, both developed in Ilford multigrade.
