I had posted this photo on my old blog 8 years ago. In this day and age it's probably daft to post a picture of - of all things - a flower. But it's a print that I come back to and it has taught me a thing or two; small lessons for myself I hadn't written about in that old post, so I thought why not do it now. Here it goes...
- For close-up photography, I should first try to use my 55mm/2.8 micro-Nikkor before reaching for the 105mm. The way the shorter lens describes three dimensional space is just wonderful. I almost feel like a bee suspended in mid-air, looking "into" the flower.
(As superb as the 55mm/2.8 micro-Nikkor is though, I find it very difficult to use for subjects that are roughly in the 3-4 meter range, like a full length portrait. The focus throw is so short, if you are the tiniest bit off you miss critical focus.)
- The line that runs down in the background is the corner of intersecting walls. It wasn't a deliberate choice; the plant just happened to sit in that corner and I didn't bother to move it. Not sure what you think, but I ended up enjoying that compositional detail. In a not too in-your-face way, it breaks up an otherwise homogeneous background. Without it, the picture would be even more banal than it is now and probably wouldn't work for me anymore.
The photo is printed on Ilford FB Warmtone semi-matt paper. A paper that has always amazed me with its gorgeous surface. It probably isn't suited for every photo, but it can be stellar with the right one. Yep, good things don’t come cheap. Still, I think every darkroom printer should at least have tried it once. It is even more beautiful after selenium or sepia toning. By the way, the colour comes from sepia toning, of course.
As for the film and development, I must've been in a very experimental mode back then, because instead of changing only one variable at a time, I changed everything at once. This is one of my very first (if not the first) Fomapan 100 roll. And in those days I was trying out various two-bath developers. Here I used a modified Stöckler developer for the first time. I'd read about it in an article by Wynn Bullock in one of the Lustrum Press "Darkroom" books and wanted to give it a go. I still can't quite fathom how the neg turned out so nice.
Some time later I became disenchanted with two-bath developers because literally everything that was written about them in the famous darkroom cookbook turned out to be false: there is significant development in the A-bath, how long you develop in the A-bath does effect the amount of development you get, therefore the A-bath can not have an indefinite life, development is temperature sensitive. I really don't know what the authors were thinking. The final nail in the two-bath coffin was when I tried to develop Delta3200 in Thornton's version. That was the worst combo I've ever tried and made me go back to good old D76, which I've used ever since.
But now, looking back at those Fomapan 100 negs that were developed in Stöckler and how exquisite it (the film? the developer? both?) has rendered the highlights in the petals…hmm...one wonders. I think I should first give 35mm Fomapan 100 a try with good old D76. See how that turns out and then take it from there.
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Let me finish with some news. I've had my Focomat 2C enlarger shipped from Turkey to Germany. Dare I say, a new darkroom might spring to life in the foreseeable future.
