Garden Thistle Still Life

[Ian-Barber]

After watching the John Blakemore video posted by @Ian Grant I remembered something that john talks about in his book which was "dont't be afraid" to experiment with tonal placement.

I noticed these garden thistles in the green rubbish box so I rescued them, placed them on some white tissue paper.

Normally I would have spot metered the darkest part, placed that on zone III, then metered the brightest part to work out if I needed to do an N+ development to bring the whites up. The only problem with that approach is that it may have produced a fairly contrasty image which was the opposite of what I was going for.

I decided to place the stem of the thistle on Zone 6 1/2 which indicated that the tissue paper fell just over Zone VIII.
The film was then developed in PyroCat HD for 12 minutes at 1:1:100 dilution.

Camer: Chamonix 045N-2
Film: Ilford FP4
Developer: Pyrocat HD 1:1:100

 

[David M]

Very delicate. Will you be taking this further?

 

[Ian-Barber]

Very delicate. Will you be taking this further?

I am going to explore this tonal placement more but I am going to have to move over to 35mm roll film though because I cannot simply afford to keep experimenting on 5x4 the way I would have liked to.

Placing the tones along the scale is not difficult but what I found difficult was trying to pre visualise what wanted to achieve.

All my life I have been a techinal and traditional person and not a creative person so this is really pushing me away from my comfort zone

 

[martin-f5]

well done! Why don't use Fomapan films, they are much cheaper and as good.

 

[Ian-Barber]

well done! Why don't use Fomapan films, they are much cheaper and as good.

I will most likely do this because I have a 30m roll of FomaPan 200 in 35mm which I can use for testing and from I have seen, the emulsion on the 35mm is to me pretty much the same as th 5x4

 

[thronobulax]

well done! Why don't use Fomapan films, they are much cheaper and as good.

Quite true, except Fompan 200 in 120 rollfilm. That film gave me horrific results due to mechanical problems with the emulsion. This was confirmed by the experience of many others around the 'net. Foma very courteously replaced my defective rollfilm with a box of 5x4 and sent me a lovely calendar in compensation. Otherwise, I've head great results wtih Foma films in a variety of formats and also their paper.

 

[Ian Grant]

Kodak, Ilford, Foma, etc, have all had issues with 120 backing paper. They all use the same supplier, and it appears they made changes that appear after storage.

Ian

 

[thronobulax]

Kodak, Ilford, Foma, etc, have all had issues with 120 backing paper. They all use the same supplier, and it appears they made changes that appear after storage.

Ian

According to Foma, the issue with 120 Fomapan 200 is that it's a emulsion hybrid with both tabular- and conventional grain components. The rolling of the film caused some of the t-grain to flake off. At least that's to the best of my recollection.

I do recall a period in which Agfapan 25 had very bad paper backing issues. I've never experienced it anywhere else other than the aforementioned Fomapan 200. If you know, please share the dates of the backing paper issues. A lot of my film is deep frozen
and may well have been purchased before the offending dates.