Aspect Ratios and Composition

Before I started shooting medium format, I got pretty comfortable composing shots using good old 35mm film with its 1:1.5 aspect ratio. I shot a lot of landscapes, and so the wider perspective made perfect sense as I tried to capture the vastness of some of what I was seeing. You can see some examples of that here.

So when I first started shooting 6x6 format on my TLR, or 6x7 on my RB67, it really felt cramped and awkward. Everything felt too tall, I could never get wide enough for the perspective that I wanted. It was pretty frustrating, and part of the reason I bought the RB67 was because I was having second-thoughts about using the TLR and was hoping the extra width of the 6x7 format would help alleviate some of my frustrations with 6x6. I even started researching 6x4.5 cameras (the lack of waist-level viewfinders turned me off though).

However, over Labor Day weekend I went to visit my family in Atlanta and shot my TLR almost exclusively because it was much lighter and more compact than the RB67. Because I was taking pictures mostly of family members, especially my nephews, I forced myself to shoot closeups, almost portraits. In general I have a problem of trying to shoot too wide, and including too many extraneous details in my photographs. The subject needs to be clear, and going in closer can help with that.

But as I started shooting very tight shots with the 6x6 camera, the benefits of the format started to make sense to me. For portraits, a person's head and shoulders fit much more comfortably in a square frame than a long 2x3 frame. But more than that, there is a certain balance to be had by putting, say, my mother's frame on the right hand side of the picture, and letting her arms flow down her shoulders from left to right and having them lead the viewer to my newborn niece laying in her arms. In a 35mm frame, landscape orientation would have cut off too much of my mom and it would not be obvious who was holding the child, while in portrait orientation there would have been too much of my mom above and below the child. While I could probably have figured out a lens/placement combination with a 35mm camera that would have achieved the effect I wanted, it all came quite natural with the 6x6 frame.

So using that knowledge, I recently shot some sunsets with a 6x6 camera (I rented a Hasselblad 503CW), and I think they turned out well. It's very interesting how the format changes the way that I compose my pictures. Instead of trying to say very broad sweeping things, now the pictures are more focused, more precise. The tops and sides of trees are cut-off, and only the meat that matters is in the frame. It's a prime example of how photography is really about showing reality as the photographer sees it. I feel as though my pictures before on 35mm were a bit more generic, they didn't communicate anything very specific. There was too much fat, I was trying to put in too much. Now my pictures are starting to have more of my ideas and thoughts in them because I'm starting to manipulate the world with the camera and show only those pieces that I think are important. I still don't think I communicate nearly as well as I should with the camera, but I feel like shooting in the 6x6 format is greatly helping me in that process by forcing me to be more focused in my compositions.

Now I'm strongly considering getting another 6x6 camera aside from my TLR. Perhaps a V-series Hassie? Maybe a Bronica? Possibly a 6000-series Rollei? We'll see. I'll need to take my TLR out into nature more for photographs before I'll have a feel for whether it's good for those types of photographs.

Finally, B&W Darkroom Success!

This past Wednesday I finally developed a roll of film that came out correct, and I successfully made a good print off of it! I spent last weekend shooting pictures near Skyline Lake where highway 280 and highway 92 intersect. I shot mostly Velvia 100 and focused on getting the sunset, but I found a deserted highway that was fairly interesting, and I thought it would look good in B&W so I shot it on HP5+.

I went into the lab with a fair amount of trepidation, since I still had not gotten everything to work right. I had bought all new developer and fixer earlier, and then on Monday I mixed the developer (Kodak D76) so that it would be at room temperature by Wednesday. But I went into the lab and everything went off without a hitch! The temperatures were correct, I read the correct developing time off of the HP5+ data sheet, and I had no issues getting the chemicals on and off the film reel in the proper order. I was in and out of the developing room in just under 30 minutes. The reel looked good as I put it into the water tank for its final rinse, but you never know until you get it fully dried.

That took another 20 minutes, during which time I checked out all the equipment I needed to make a contact sheet and setup everything at the enlarger. After all that work developing the film I wanted to see what it would finally look like, on a print! When I pulled it out of the dryer, the negatives looked fantastic, with consistently good contrast throughout the entire strip and the edges between the frames clearly delineated. It looked nothing like the mess I had the last time I developed film, that's for sure!

I put the negatives under the enlarger to make a proof sheet, and was pleasantly surprised when the test strip showed that even 8 seconds of exposure was too much for the contact sheet! I did another test strip at 1 second increments, then printed the contact sheet at 5 seconds, everything looked great! I ended up having enough time in the lab left over to make a few prints, so I chose my favorite frame and made about five prints. It looks gorgeous! I haven't had time to scan in the negatives to attach to this post so that everyone can see, but I'm quite happy! It's not a terribly interesting set of pictures anyway, just something I knew would be a good for me to practice developing pictures on.

Now I feel much more confident in developing my film for the next assignment. Yay! :-)

B&W Darkroom Disasters!

So I've been taking a beginning B&W photography class this fall because I want to learn more about darkroom processes. I figured out how to print successfully relatively quickly, although I wouldn't pretend to be good at it yet. The prints I've made consistently lack that great pop that well-made prints have, that excellently deep and rich contrast. But I feel like I'm getting there, and it's only a matter of time... well, first I have to decide if I really like B&W all that much. We'll see.

The developing side, however, has been an absolute disaster! I have now developed four rolls of film, and all four have been crap. The first one was a series of test shots on 35mm that I didn't roll onto the reel properly, so parts of it didn't develop properly. That's not a surprise, as getting the film onto the reel properly is probably the hardest part of developing film, and almost everyone in class had a problem with that.

The next three rolls I tried developing, though, were even greater disasters! First I mixed a batch of Kodak's D76 developer. Now, the directions tell you to heat the water to 124 degrees F so that everything will dissolve properly. Not a problem, the darkroom has a hot water tap, and the water basically came out at right around that temperature. However, the developing directions then tell you to develop with the developer at 68 degrees F. Hmmm... so I mixed it at 124 degrees, but I have to use it at 68 degrees. Curses!! I tried and tried to get the temperature down to 68F, but the best I could do was 80F.

At this point I had wasted half an hour just trying to get the temperature down, and I only had a limited amount of time in the darkroom, so I just decided to develop the film at 80F. I looked up the stats for the film I was using (Ilford HP5), and it indicated that if I needed to cut my development time almost in half in order at that temperature, so I did that. Little did I know, but at 80 degrees D76 developer is too "active", and it actually started developing film that hadn't been exposed yet! The end result was that the negatives I had were extremely "dense", meaning that they were too dark. When I attempted to print these negatives, so little light was hitting the paper that I had to use exposure times of over 12 minutes!! Unfortunately these negatives contained my assignment for the class, so I couldn't simply throw them out, I had to get prints from them. Suffice it to say, I spent four hours just trying to get a decent print from these negatives. When you're forced to use a 12 min exposure time on paper, you find out all kinds of interesting things. Like enlarger lenses that vignette wide open are a real problem at such a long exposure time, so expect to spend a long time burning in the edges. Or that paper does indeed have reciprocity failure. The ambient light of the darkroom was actually brighter than the light coming from the negative onto the paper, so I had to build a little "shrine" out of towels and paper bags to block out all the ambient light!

Even worse than that, I then decided to develop the B&W rolls that I had shot at my cousin's wedding. I went through all the same steps as I had done with the other rolls, but somehow I apparently got the fixer and the developer mixed up, because when I was done developing the rolls, they had absolutely no information on them. Nothing. It was completely clear plastic, not even the numbers from each frame around the borders was showing up. That normally means that you've put in fixer before developer, so the fixer has completely wiped everything off of the film. But I swear I was very careful about the order of the chemicals, and that couldn't have happened! In any case, I threw out all my developer and fixer and bought all new chemicals so that I could rule out bad chemicals as the cause. I then shot one more roll this past weekend so that I can try again to successfully develop film.

Sigh, what I wouldn't give to just see that nicely developed B&W film, clear on the edges but nicely shaded silver color on the inside. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon, since it's the whole reason I'm taking the class!