4x5 Monochrome Images

Why?

Because I don't like the way modern cameras do everything for you, or require a course of study and a small child to point out the appropriate place in the manual.

These images were taken with a sixty year old camera - an Micro Precision Press - through a lens equally old, and are all on 125ASA Ilford FP4+. They haven't been played with other than by the auto-correction for gamma, gain, and black level in the scanning software (XSane under Ubuntu 10.04); all the dust, scratches, and fingerprints are my own work.

Many of these images display patches where the chemistry has not flooded the negative evenly in development. Due to a limited number of film carriers, I had to develop them on the day taken in hotel bathrooms and other unsuitable places; however I kept some to develop later and unfortunately the heat and humidity was unkind to the gelatin on the film. Particularly bad ones are #0005, #0007, and #0010 but there are other less severe instances.

The images were exposed at the default 125ASA with the intention of printing on normal bromide paper. In the darker images (e.g. #0009, #0013, #0022, and particularly #0023) there is information visible in the darker areas but the scanner over-exposes and cannot resolve them. Future work might be better exposed at 80ASA or slower - though that brings the possibility of overexposure in the whites... Dear Ilford, please can we have the gorgeous PAN-f in sheet film?

All images are copyright Neil Barnes 2002-2011 and may not be used for commercial purposes without my express permission - are you listening, Google?

Warning: the 'thumbnails' on this page are approximately 100kB each. Downloading the images behind them will require about 10MB each, and they will expand to over 100MB each.