#FP4Party April 2021

Two years ago, less a couple of months, for the #FP4Party in February 2019, I used my Ensign Folding Klito de Luxe No.9 with some old Ilford FP4 sheet film in quarterplate size; two boxes of this had come as part of a larger job lo: both were unopened boxes of 50 sheets each, both with the handwritten date of 16/11/78. I'd used film from this stock for the January and March #FP4Parties in 2019 too, in different cameras; for April 2021's #FP4Party, when considering what format to use, I saw that I had seven sheets of the last box of this film left, assuming I'd tallied my usage correctly. Thus, I decided to simply shoot one sheet a day for each day of shoot week, and the choice of camera had to be the Ensign Folding Klito de Luxe No.9 as it's the best of the three quarterplate-sized cameras I have. In 2019, in the three successive months, I'd shot two sheets a day, hopefully providing a 'good' and a 'spare'; with only seven sheets left this was not a luxury I could allow myself. In the event, I did accidentally use two sheets on one day, a result of unclear labelling of my plateholders. 

Although I was exposing just one sheet of FP4 each day, I also photographed each subject on other film stocks, some Ilford F.P.3 from the 1940s, and Ilford Fine Grain Ordinary N5.31 film (this box has a handwritten date of 11/3/70): without thinking, I picked up a second plateholder when photographing on the Friday, thinking it was the latter film when instead it was a second sheet of the FP4. In order to shoot FP4 film each day of the shoot week with two days to go and only one sheet of quarterplate-size FP4, I then cut down some larger FP4 Plus film to fit the format. Having made a jig that I taped to a cutting mat to cut the film to size inside a changing bag, I found this more difficult than expected. I tried to cut some 9x12cm film to quarterplate size–8.2x10.8cm–but found it was far too easy for the film to move around while changing from a cut in one orientation to the second cut in the other. After spoiling one sheet of 9x12cm FP4 Plus, and badly cutting another, I then cut down a sheet of 5x4-inch FP4 Plus. For this I only made one cut, going from 5 inches to 3¼ inches; quarterplate film measures 4¼ by 3¼ inches, but for ease of cutting down film to use in the Klito, 4 inches by 3¼ would have to do.

Part way through shoot week, I developed the first four sheets, partly as I didn't have enough spare film sheathes to load seven plateholders at the start of the week. This was also instructive: I had overestimated the bellows factor on the sheets already exposed, resulting in dense negatives, especially Thursday's; as a result, on Friday and Saturday I didn't compensate in exposure for bellows factor, and the negatives developed fine (Saturday's shot was taken on the cut-down 5x4, rated the same as the FP4 from the 1970s, although its process before date was only April 2010). As a consequence of simply being at home throughout the week, almost all the photographs were of close-focus subjects around the house and garden (such subjects needing to compensate for bellows factor–or not as the case seemed to be). The weather was almost uniformly sunny, with the brief exception of showers on the Saturday afternoon, which I tried to record somewhat obliquely.

The first shot of the week I'd hoped to have been better, but there was too much of a breeze to use an exposure time of 1/5th and expect the subject to be sharp; Sunday's subject, the last sheet of the 100, I chose the tree outside my window which I had been photographing for an entire year, and had indeed only recently finished that project, but wanted to record its new growth after being heavily pruned in the autumn. This shot suffered from a light leak which I think may have been due to mixing up darkslides and plateholders: some of the plateholders which fit the Klito camera are branded Klito; some are AP Paris; and others are unbranded, and, although very close in all respects, it's easy to mix up the darkslides and then find some are a better fit than others. 

 

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