Isolation Projects

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negatives, first 28 days

In my post two months ago for 'Expired Film Day 2020', I referenced the current coronavirus pandemic, the full restrictions of which had come into force between taking the photographs, and then developing, scanning, and posting two weeks later. UK-wide restrictions were much less stringent than in other countries: even at the height of the pandemic, I could have left the house every day to take photographs, on my daily exercise or on essential shopping trips; in my post on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, I did reference that I couldn't go out to take photographs. The inference in this statement was that with a large format camera and long exposures, going out specifically to take photographs, with stopping for long periods with a camera on a tripod, would appear to be against the spirit of the rules then, if not the letter.

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, Kodak Recomar 33

Instead, as with a number of photographers, I have been taking photographs at home for the duration. One participatory project initiated online by the artist William Arnold Goldstrom, 'Lockdown Living Spaces' uses the tag #covidobscura on Instagram. He invited artists to make long-exposures on photographic paper of their domestic spaces during lockdown - essentially, lumen prints, as the image below - which would then be scanned unfixed, digitally inverted into positives.

Unfixed paper negative lumen print, Kodak Recomar 33

I took part with a variety of cameras and formats - large format, quarterplate, 116 - with exposures ranging from one to three weeks, and for the two months from the 24th March, had at least one camera exposing at any one time. I also used three different types of photographic paper - Ilford Multigrade IV, Adox MCP 310, and grade 2 Ilfospeed paper from the 1970s. Photographing domestic spaces, for most of the cameras I used wide angle lenses or supplementary lenses: the image above, shot on Ilfospeed paper with a Kodak Recomar 33, used a Proxar supplementary lens; the image below, on Adox MCP paper, used a 75mm Dehel Manar lens on my MPP Micro-Technical Mk VIII.

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, MPP Micro-Technical Mk VIII

Being fortunate enough to be able to work from home, documenting this time through long exposures of the domestic space as a work environment show traces of activity and the passing of time, while the human figure moves too quickly to register (although there is a faint indication of a blur in front of the monitor in the first image above). I found with slower lenses, as with the Kodak No.2A Brownie and the Cameo, two or three weeks were needed to give an image good enough for scanning; I also found that the scanning process darkened all of the paper considerably, as well as time outside the camera of course. I did fix some of the paper after scanning, but the images became much lighter after fixing. The best results were those using the Adox MCP paper; those using Ilford Multigrade produced a wider range of colours (on black and white paper) - not having much experience with lumen prints, this was a little surprising to me at least: the first two images below are on Multigrade; the Kodak Recomar shot is on Ilfospeed grade 2, while the other photographs use Adox MCP paper.

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, Kodak No.2A Brownie

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, Butcher's Cameo

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, Butcher's Cameo

Unfixed paper negative, digitally inverted, MPP Micro-Technical Mk VI

The day after setting up a couple of cameras for the #covidobscura project, I embarked on another series of photographs under the provisional title of 'Quaratine'. Looking for a subject in that fourth week of March, I noticed that the tree outside my window was just coming into leaf: I have been photographing it every day since as spring gives way to summer, the clocks went forward, the evenings get lighter, the full leaves on the tree being followed by blossom, which has now come and gone.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negatives, weeks 5-8

These photographs were shot on photographic paper, with the intention of developing the paper, unlike the #covidobscura images. I used a Rietzschel Heli-Clack 9x12cm large format folding plate camera for these photographs. Prior to the lockdown, I had shot some paper negatives with this camera using the same Ilfospeed paper stock that I'd used for the #covidobscura lumen images. One reason for using this paper was simply that it was 3 1/2 x 5 inches, 8.9x12.7cm, which meant I only needed to cut 7mm from one side of the paper to fit the 9x12cm plateholders (although in the event cutting the paper to 11.9cm fits the film sheathes better).

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negative on Ilfospeed grade 2 RC paper

Being grade 2, I shot the Ilfospeed paper rated 6, which gave fairly consistent results without flashing or filtering. The box dates back to the late 1970s, but the only sign of age with the paper appears to be a slight yellowing to the base, which is not unattractive. I decided to take two shots each day, to guard against any mistakes, and providing the opportunity to choose the best of the two; I quickly used up the remaining sheets in the Ilfospeed box. The next photographs were shot on Adox MCP 310 paper. As a variable contrast paper, the results were generally higher in contrast than the grade 2 paper, but the Adox MCP paper does seem to be good at retaining highlight detail, and I shot this at an exposure index of either 10 or 12.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negative on Adox MCP 310 RC paper

However, the Adox paper was cut down from much larger sheets; this paper has been discontinued from the start of this year and there seemed to be little available online when looking for a replacement as this started to run low. I switched to using Ilford Multigrade IV paper, having bought a box of 8.9x14cm specifically for the project, which, again, needs just one cut to fit the film sheathes. Unlike both the Ilfospeed and Adox papers, I found Multigrade IV to be too high in contrast to use 'straight' in the camera. I made a couple of tests before using this paper for the project, having researched online the different approaches taken to shooting paper negatives. In the lower of the two tests below, the difference a green filter makes is quite marked; the green filter was used as a 'minus-magenta' filter. It would have been possible to use Multigrade filters with the paper to control contrast, but as the high contrast layers in the paper are sensitive to magenta light, using a light green filter worked perfectly well.

Ilford Multigrade IV RC paper test rated 12/6/3 right to left

Ilford Multigrade IV paper test with light green filter rated 12/6/3 (adjusted for filter) right to left

I developed the paper negatives in Ilford Multigrade paper developer, with dilutions from 1+9 to around 1+30 or even 1+50; I had thought that high dilutions of the developer might also have an affect on the contrast, but this mainly seems to affect developing time. What this does mean is that it was easier to pull paper negatives from the developer early if these appeared to be developing too dark due to overexposure. However, as a general rule, this often showed as uneven development, and in most cases, I achieved more consistent results from allowing development to complete, and attempt to get the best exposure, within practical terms, when shooting the paper.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negative on Ilford Multigrade IV RC (green filter)

Initially, I hadn't made any conscious decisions about how these photographs were to be displayed when I began taking them, but after developing the first batch, the quality of the negatives themselves seemed promising: I liked the distance as photograph it provides, and it also meant that I could use a direct product of the camera, due to the relatively large negative size and the fact that it was shot on paper. If exhibited, these paper negatives would be presented as grids of images, their number marking the days of confinement and the passing of time evidenced in the changes of the natural world.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negative on Ilford Multigrade IV RC (green filter)

Having decided to show the Quarantine photographs as paper negatives, rather than either make positives by contact printing these, or digital positives, this also affected the way I continued to shoot the paper. Having experimented with 'flashing' some of the paper, I preferred the look of this - although the image above would no doubt work well as a negative to obtain a positive, aesthetically, I find the shadow areas rather 'bright', and so used flashing to bring up the shadow areas, which also helps reduce contrast. I had been keeping a log of all the exposure details of this set of paper negatives, but, frustratingly, the text file I had been adding to every day got corrupted 8 weeks in and I was only able to recover some of the information. It's easy to see the difference between the three papers I used, less easy to see which were flashed, in camera, in the darkroom, or before or after exposure. The image below is, I think, one of the flashed paper negatives: the shadow areas have just a little more density than in the negative above.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negative on Ilford Multigrade IV RC (flashed?)

Having spent some time trying to get the best results from the Multigrade paper, I found a couple of boxes of Ilfospeed grade 2 paper online. of a similar vintage to the first box, with which to continue the project for several more weeks. As it was impractical to keep the camera set up on a tripod to take the same shot day after day, week after week, this has forced me to attempt different ways of photographing the subject each day, or, conversely, repeating compositions and framing specifically to show the passing of time. As previously mentioned, the restrictions of movement due to the pandemic have been much less strict in the UK than other countries, although the measures announced on March 23rd did provide a clear start to the 'lockdown'; what's less clear is what might mark the end, and so the end of this particular project. Tomorrow, June 1st, is the beginning of another round of restrictions being eased, but by no means the end of them and so I am inclined to continue with the daily ritual of photographing from my window for the time being.

'Quarantine', 9x12cm paper negatives

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2020

Paper negative on Adox MCP 310 RC paper, inverted and flipped in Photoshop

Last Sunday was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Being unable to go out to take photographs as in other years (although carrying around a large format camera, tripod and film holders could arguably be defined as exercise), I did want to mark the day and made four exposures in the garden using the MPP Micro-Technical Mk VIII camera with the 0.3mm pinhole lensboard I'd made for it. As the camera's focus moves the lensboard, the focal length can be changed: in the past I've shot pinhole photographs at a 'normal' angle of view for the 4x5 inch large format; here, I used approximately 100mm for the focal length, moderately wide. At longer focal lengths, exposure times start to get frustratingly long; the four photographs were taken successively over about an hour.

Having been working with paper negatives recently, I thought that I'd shoot a negative and a positive on photographic paper rather than use film or plates as on other years. The negative was shot on Adox MCP 310 RC paper, which I've used for some of the recent paper negatives and which, for variable contrast paper, has a certain amount of latitude. I did flash this to reduce contrast further, and used a light green filter.  I rated the paper at an exposure index of 12, and doubled the exposure time for the filter factor. Shooting on variable contrast paper, green is useful as a minus-magenta filter: the high contrast layer(s) in the paper are sensitive towards magenta. This seems to make sense to me; a similar result could probably be achieved by using a low-number Multigrade filter when shooting. The subject, raspberry canes, were lit with sun coming through the leaves of a tree, so this made for high-contrast subject to begin with. The positive was shot on Harman Direct Positive Paper. This is around ten years old, and the result wasn't as good as I had hoped. I rated this at 6, and flashed the paper. The highlights look overexposed, but the paper hasn't developed anywhere near dark enough. The shadows are all a mid grey, and there's the kind of texture running through it that one sometimes get when backing paper reacts with the emulsion on medium format film. The Harman Direct Positive Paper hasn't been stored with any care since I bought it a decade ago, so this might not be surprising, but I have had good results with other kinds of photographic papers of much older vintages. The image at the top of the post is the inverted paper negative, which worked well enough on its own.

Harman Direct Positive RC paper

Paper negative on Adox MCP 310 RC paper

I developed the paper in Ilford Multigrade paper developer diluted 1+20; the dilution of the developer doesn't seem to affect the contrast that much, but diluting it further than usual does make it easier to control the degree of development as it extends the time, although both papers in this case were left to develop to completion. This may not have helped the Harman Direct Positive Paper, but this doesn't explain the texture. I also shot two sheets of Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic film, one of which was fogged, and developed these at the same time in the same paper developer; the negatives are high contrast, as one might expect. Currently without access to scanning for large format negatives, I made a contact print on Silverprint Solar Print paper - a form of ready-sensitised cyanotype paper, for which the contrast of the negative worked well.

Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic film contact print on Solar Print paper

The Image Circle

Jupiter-8 50mm lens with Ilford FP4

“All lenses, regardless of format, project a circular image, and the rectangular film format must fit within this image-circle. With a small camera, a high-quality image is required within the film area, and the remainder of the image circle is disregarded. A view camera, on the other hand, requires an image-circle considerably larger than the film area, to allow freedom to use the camera adjustments. A lens’s covering power or coverage refers to the total image-circle; it is a fixed quantity, regardless of the film format, and is not a function of focal length.”

Ansel Adams, The Camera

The rectangular photographic image is a convention derived by the historically existing relationship to painting and other graphic arts (note, for example, the use of the term ‘print’ for the photographic image on paper), and this frame is built in to the technology itself. The rectangle has much to recommend it, but it is not inherent to the photographic image. The image that a lens forms is circular; the rectangular frame is ultimately a legacy of architecture via the portable easel painting (tracing this legacy further back, cave paintings and rock art do not have definable edges: organic surfaces and surface decoration are essentially integrated). Of course, many photographs have been framed in a circular fashion - the first Kodak camera used a circular mask to make round images, and for Polaroid cameras, the Impossible Project make an instant film with a round frame - but these are a vestigial reminder of the fact that an image produced by a lens is circular - again, it is as likely that this alternative convention of the round frame is derived from painting (the portrait miniature, as many daguerreotypes were originally presented) and architecture, and perhaps also the experience of viewing images produced by other lens-based technologies such as telescopes and microscopes, around long before photography. Given the construction of the eye, specifically that the eye has a lens analogous to the photographic lens, there is a direct relationship to human vision, in which one can never really perceive its edges; with binocular vision this becomes an awareness of a squashed oval visual field, where beyond the edge is simply an infinitude of nothing.

In Ansel Adams' quote above, the must in "the rectangular film format must fit within this image-circle" was something I wanted to challenge. In photography, the circular image is only generally seen in extreme wide angles, such as the fish eye lens, and begins to announce its presence in the vignetting that accompanies simple lenses on cheap cameras (as with the Diana and the V. P. Twin). I wanted to achieve something other than a distorted image, which would obscure the object of this exercise: the distorted image would be remarkable for those qualities, not merely for being circular.

Demaria-Lapierre 75mm Manar Anastigmat lens

The first photographs used a 75mm f3.5 Manar Anastigmat lens, which originally came from a Dehel medium format folding camera, of which I converted the body to make my 127 format film cutter. Although the Dehel camera was 6x4.5, a 75mm focal length lens would equally be used for a square 6x6 format; the lens itself just happened to be the right size to fit on a conical lens board for the Micro-Technical Mk VIII. I used the Mk VIII as the folding bed can be dropped to two different positions, an important factor if this is not to intrude into the picture itself with such a wide angle lens (the angle of view itself being a relationship of focal length to image size - on the 6x4.5 negative format, 75mm represents a 'normal' angle of view). Although the edges of the image circle can be seen with the 75mm lens, the whole circle is too large to fit on the 4x5 negative. I had assumed that, as a fairly cheap triplet lens, the Manar's coverage would not be very good, but this was better than expected.

75mm Manar Anastigmat on Kodak Plus-X

75mm Manar Anastigmat with Ilford FP4

As part of this exercise, I did also photograph a white wall, unfocussed, in order to see the effect more clearly. I began with the assumption that a small aperture would provide better coverage but found that this was not the case (this was something I'd read about coverage in relation to using camera movements in large format; I wanted as small an image circle as was possible, hence using wide apertures); in the shots taken with the Manar lens, the clearest circle is that taken at f32, fairly obvious in the two comparisons below - although it is true to say that the definition at the edges is better and therefore a smaller aperture may describe a larger usable image circle, without the circle itself being any larger - indeed, the circle appears slightly smaller.

75mm Manar Anastigmat at f5.6 on Ilford FP4 film

75mm Manar Anastigmat st f32 on Ilford FP4 film

When extending the lens to close focus, the image circle expands to fill whole film area, as below, with only very little distortion visible in the corners; focussing even closer could have made this distortion fall outside the area of the film completely.

74mm Manar Anastigmat with Ilford FP4

Although the photographs shot at small apertures produced a fairly clear circle, it was larger than the 4x5-inch film format; to produce a complete circle, with a sharp image and clean edge, I used the Jupiter-8 f2 50mm lens from my Kiev-4, as this has a protruding, narrow rear element - a function of it not having a focussing helical built into the lens. This meant that it was relatively easy to fix it into a lensboard, improvised with card retaining rings (holding the red infinity tab) and rubber bands. Unlike the Manar lens, the Jupiter-8 does not have a shutter, which meant that exposures had to be made by the simple expedient of removing then replacing the lens cap. This created some problems in terms of exposure: I was still working on the assumption that smaller apertures would give better coverage.

Jupiter-8 50mm lens

The first photographs with both lenses I shot on Ilford FP4, which, even rating at 64 to compensate for age (the film has a date hand written on the box 11/4/78, with the label printing dating to June 1976), made it difficult to attempt exposures of less than 1/2 a second by hand, and, in addition, the weather was sunny and bright. I did also take some photographs on Rollei ATO 2.1, rated at 6, which did provide long enough exposure times, but the high contrast images did not really convey the effect I wanted to achieve clearly: again, I wanted the circular image to be the distinct feature of the photographs. I shot a second set of images on Kodak Plus-X rated 25, on an overcast day, which made it easier to shoot with the Jupiter-8 lens relatively wide open. As well as not having a shutter, the 50mm lens also had a problem in that it could not be placed far back enough into the camera to achieve infinity focus, which is the reason for the images below being close focused: with the front standard racked back into the camera body as far as possible, I moved the camera and tripod forward until the image came into focus. In order to place the lens further back, a recessed lens board would be required (this should also, in theory, make the image circle smaller).

50mm Jupiter-8 lens with Rollei ATO 2.1

Jupiter-8 50mm lens with Kodak Plus-X

The Jupiter-8 lens made a circular image onto the film with surprisingly little distortion, except at the very edges (a side effect of using smaller apertures is that both lenses appear to show some form of internal reflections in the camera, visible as rings around the image circle itself). With edge distortion being affected by aperture, further tests at smaller apertures with a recessed lensboard might provide even crisper, clearer circular images. Although this was simply an exercise to work through - in practical terms - some ideas about the intrinsic edge of the photographic image, I do think that there is something remarkable about the idea that, in almost every photograph you have ever seen, the image formed by the lens has been cropped by the camera.

References
Ansel Adams, The Camera, Little, Brown and Company, New York 1980, twelfth paperback printing, 2005.
Alan Horder (editor), The Manual of Photography, sixth edition, Focal Press Limited 1971

Other glass plates

Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic glass plate

As well as the Selochrome stereo plates written about in my last post, I have also shot a number of different plates for night photography in recent months. I've used the last of the large format Selochrome plates written about in 2014 with some good results. Also mentioned in that blogpost were the Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plates which were heavily fogged around the edges, so much so that I had all but written off using the plates. However, as I'd had a couple sitting in a plateholder for months, I decided to expose one on the same night as exposing this image on one of the Selochrome plates, and giving a moderately long exposure provided an image far less obscured by the fogging around the edges than I'd previously experienced.

Kodak Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plate

As the Wratten & Wainwright box was sealed when I got it, I don't have a good theory as to why the plates shot recently should be less fogged than the others, except perhaps the fact that these plates would be from the central portion of the box, with a number of plates stacked on top (and below) the two illustrated here - although the edges of the plates themselves remain in the same relation to the edges of the box as those at the top or bottom of the stack.

Wratten & Wainwright glass plate

Incidentally both plates shown here exhibit true solarisation - the brightest highlights in the streetlamps have turned black. The term solarisation (when not describing a digital filter) is usually applied to what is more properly known as the Sabatier effect: the exposure in these highlight areas is such that the negative begins to lose density beyond the shoulder section of the characteristic curve (this phenomenon gets a brief mention in Ansel Adams' The Negative when describing his photograph The "Black Sun", Owens Valley, California). There's still a fair amount of fogging, and exposing for longer to combat this has resulted in what appears to be grain seen in the highlight areas, but this is scanner noise caused by the high density.

Late last year, I found two boxes of 4x5 inch plates, both Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic - one box had been previously opened, but then resealed with black tape, and no plates had been used from it. I opened the other box for the information leaflet inside, which provided a date - August 1959.

Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic glass plates

As described in the Ilford Manual of Photography (1946), Rapid Process Panchromatic plates were "For copying coloured originals. A plate of high contrast. The standard plate for colour separation screen negatives for photo-lithography." These were fifth highest in the list of plates by contrast in the Manual, and, as a process plate, it isn't given a speed: these plates were not intended for pictorial photography. The word Rapid in the name refers I think more to the speed of development rather than sensitivity - the information leaflet with the plates gives a development time of 2 1/2 minutes in ID13. The plates were introduced in 1918, and, according to Silver By The Ton, were rated 8 ASA in the post-1960 standard: other plates with the term Rapid in the name around the same time were rated 20 ASA.

Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic test plate

For a test exposure, I rated one plate with an exposure index of 10 as a reasonable starting point, and with three successive exposures by progressively withdrawing the dark slide, gave the plate effective exposure indices of 10, 5, and 2.5 from right to left in the shot above. This was stand developed in RO9 One Shot, diluted 1+150 (to reduce contrast) for one hour. The results were very encouraging. The central section, with an effective rating of 5, looked best from the test plate. However, when shooting them at night, the first set of plates did appear to be overexposed, not helped by using a developer dilution of 1+100, rather than 1+150. The highlights in these negatives are very dense, and this again added noise when scanning in these areas, much like the Wratten & Wainwright plates: the image at the top of this post is one of the plates shot and developed in this fashion. I reduced my exposure times for the next shots by around one stop, and developed these plates at 1+150, as below.

Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic plate

The Rapid Process Panchromatic plates are amongst the best I've used, in terms of the emulsion showing very little age-related deterioration; when coupled with getting the exposure right and developing to reduce the inherent contrast, the plates produce excellent results.

Ilford R.40 Rapid Process Panchromatic plate

Special Rapid Panchromatic plates

I've also recently used some quarter-plate size Special Rapid Panchromatic plates. First produced in 1919 at 32 ASA, these are "Fine grain. Fairly high contrast. General purpose plate. Widely used in scientific; and in the photo-mechanical trade for block making, offset work and photogravure." These are just above the middle of the contrast range of Ilford plates at the time. A leaflet inside the box was dated to 1946.

Special Rapid Panchromatic plate test

Rather than shooting these plates for the ongoing night photography project, I used most of the plates from the box on the LAPC photo walk last month; these were just fast enough to use handheld, rated around 10. The test plate above was also rated 10: with three successive exposures, the middle section at an exposure index of 5 provides a fuller negative. The plate below was one that I did shoot at night with a twenty-minute exposure which captured people queuing at a bar better than expected, if still very faint.

Special Rapid Panchromatic plate

Some time around 1950 Ilford's plate names gained prefixes with a letter and numerals: the Special Rapid Panchromatic above were later given the prefix R.20 as seen on this leaflet. I've wondered for some time about how these were constructed, what was the logic to them. The Hypersensitive Panchromatic and Fine Grain Panchromatic emulsions, being new just before the second world war, were not abbreviated in same way as other emulsions later: these were already abbreviated to HP and FP while the films went through their numerical iterations. Most other plates were given the alphabetical prefixes R, G and N (although not all - Selochrome didn't gain a prefix, but this was more of a brand name than a descriptor). Looking at the spectral sensitivity of the plates, as all panchromatic plates are given an R, it would appear that the letter are R denotes red sensitive; G plates are 'highly orthochromatic' with sensitivity extended into the yellow part of the spectrum that perhaps G is for green sensitive; and N for 'ordinary' plates would possibly mean not colour sensitive. I haven't found a logic to the numbers. One wonders if photographers stopped calling Soft Gradation Panchromatic plates that, and started referring to them simply as R.10 plates?

References
The Negative, Ansel Adams, 1981
Silver By The Ton, RJ Hercock and GA Jones,1979
The Ilford Manual of Photography, James Mitchell (ed.), 1946

Expired Film Day 2016

Kodak Plus-X, develop before date of July 1972

Having missed the last couple of 127 Days for a variety of reasons, on the 15th this week I participated in the new Expired Film Day ('Take Your Box Camera To Play Day' also happens to be this weekend, 18th-20th March). I frequently use decades-old photographic emulsions, notably in glass plate night photography. I did consider shooting some glass plates on the day, but instead, as part of an unrelated ongoing project of large format photographs around Walthamstow Marshes, I used the opportunity of Expired Film Day to shoot some 4x5 sheet film with the MPP Micro-Technical Mk VI: a box of Ilford FP4 with a hand written date of 11/4/78; Kodak Plus-X with a develop before date of July 1972; and Kodak Panchro-Royal, not dated, but the box looks older than the Plus-X, possibly 1960s. I had previously tested all three films to get a usable exposure index: the FP4 was rated half box speed, while the other two were shot at an exposure index of 25.

Ilford FP4, with handwritten date 11/4/78

Both the FP4 and Plus-X provided results which do not look like forty-year old film (and as such wouldn't win the Expired Film Day prize categories 'Most Obviously Expired Film' or 'Best Use of Overexposure'), but the Panchro-Royal clearly shows characteristic deterioration with age. I used both the 16.5cm Tessar and the Bausch & Lomb Rapid Rectilinear which I've written about in the post Old Lenses; the Rapid Rectilinear is the oldest lens I have, and so it seemed appropriate to use it for the day.

Kodak Plus-X, develop before date July 1972

Kodak Panchro-Royal sheet film, possibly 1960s

There's very little information on Kodak Panchro-Royal online, and this gave the worst performance of the three films I shot (the FP4 and Panchro-Royal came from the same collection of photographic material, and may - or may not - have been stored in the same conditions). As well as having much more obvious fog, it also suffered from a good deal of cusping, the film being far from flat, and this made scanning more difficult. Some of the shots were taken using only the rear elements of the Rapid Rectilinear lens, as described in Old Lenses, as the Panchro-Royal image above, and the shot below on Plus-X. All the sheet film was stand developed in R09 One Shot diluted 1+100 for one hour, partly due to developing all the films together, but some unevenness was evident in the development discernible in the featureless skies of most of the negatives.

Kodak Plus-X, develop before date July 1972

In addition to the sheet film I also finished a part-used roll of medium format Kodak Plus-X, which had a develop before date of 03/2006 - a neat ten years out of date. This was exposed at box speed and developed in R09 One Shot diluted 1+29 for 9 minutes at 20ºC. Incidentally, I had intended to use this time and dilution with Ilfotec LC29, and only realised my mistake when the wrong developer was mixed and in the tank. However, the times and dilutions being relatively similar, I stuck with the time for Ilfotec LC29, which resulted in perfectly usable negatives.

Medium format Kodak Plus-X, develop before March 2006

Medium format Kodak Plus-X, develop before March 2006

Some large format glass plates

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch glass plate

In my posts about the ongoing glass plate night photography project, I've written about how some sizes are more common than others. Of all the relatively standard formats, 4x5 inches appear less frequently than quarterplate or the small metric and imperial sizes: in the past year I have only acquired two boxes in this size since using up the box of Air Ministry plates.

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic Dry Plates

The first of these are Wratten and Wainwright Metallographic Dry Plates. Wratten and Wainwright were a British company bought by Eastman Kodak in 1912 (a few years earlier, Eastman Kodak had made approaches to buy or merge with Ilford, presumably to gain larger market share in the UK). The Wratten name was used as a Kodak brand for many years afterwards, notably for filters and safelights, as demonstrated by the instructions at the top of the box. The Art Nouveau typeface used on the box label suggested that the plates were old, as did the explicit use of the phrase 'Dry Plates'; dry plates had been around since the last quarter of the 19th century and superseded the wet plate process, such that it quickly became reasonable to assume that photographic plates were all of the dry variety, and none of the many other boxes of plates I've collected and used are described as 'dry plates'; indeed, even at the time one would never have found boxes of wet plates as a commodity, as the wet plate process required the photographer to coat a sheet of glass and then expose this in the camera before the emulsion had time to dry. The development of the dry photographic plate itself allowed the emergence of companies such as Eastman and Ilford to supply material to photographers, taking the step of preparing a light sensitive surface away from the photographer and into the business of mass production (however, as there are contemporary photographers who have revived the wet plate process prominently enough, when I mention shooting with glass plates, this becomes an occasional misunderstanding). The reverse of the card inside the box has the numbers '5/35' at the bottom, which may be a date of printing. I have used a later version of Metallographic plates before with some success.

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plate test

The test shot shows the Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plates to be heavily fogged at the edges, but clear in the central portion. I did shoot a couple of these plates at night, but I was disappointed with the impenetrable fog around the edges of the plates. I had previously achieved some good images from the box of Air Ministry plates which were of a similar age, but as I have found as a very general rule, Kodak plates on the whole have tended not to age as well as Ilford plates; most of the glass plates I've used over the last couple of years have been either Kodak or Ilford, and I tend not to buy Kodak plates now unless in a rare size such as 4x5 inches (I do not have any information as to which manufacturer supplied the Air Ministry plates).

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic glass plate

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plates

Around the same time I also bought an unopened box of Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plates. These had a leaflet inside which was dated to 1951. The wrapper around the box has two different styles of label: on the side, the narrow label is a newer design, with Ilford written in a sans serif font. Like the Wratten and Wainwright plates, Selochrome is also orthochromatic (a panchromatic version of Selochrome was later made, at least as a roll film by Ilford, which I used on the last 127 Day). The Ilford Manual of Photography describe Selochrome as "a fast plate for general purposes. Of average contrast. Fine grain and highly orthochromatic." I shot a test at the same time as the Metallographic plate. The result below looks relatively high in contrast, but this is in part due to the image being scanned from a contact print. The plates have aged quite well, with a few spotting marks, appearing on some plates more than others. The image at the top of this post is the best example of a photograph shot on these plates. I also shot the same scene on one of the Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plates for comparison.

Ilford Selochrome plate test

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plate

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plate

As well as 4x5 inch plates, I am also including in this post 9x12cm plates. As mentioned in my post on the Ica Trona 210, 9x12cm usually qualifies for large format. Last year, I wrote about finding three previously opened boxes of 9x12cm plates, which I got a few good results from two of the boxes. Earlier this year, I bought a job lot of three boxes of Ilford HP3, all previously unopened.

Ilford HP3 9x12cm glass plates

I could see from the box style before bidding on the lot that these were possibly late 1960s or early 70s. When the boxes arrived, one was not sealed, but was full; I opened one of the other boxes to find the leaflet inside. This was dated to 1973, just two years from the end of plate manufacture at Ilford. What the leaflet shows is just how many different types of plates (eight) were still being made at that late date. HP4 was introduced in 1966, but was made alongside HP3, and did not replace it for a number of years according to Photomemorabilia's Ilford Chronology, possibly HP3 as a plate emulsion was continued until glass plate manufacture ceased, and HP4 is not listed on the leaflet from the box. At this late date the HP name is also given in full: Hypersensitive Panchromatic. The boxes also contained 36 plates each - all previous boxes of photographic plates I've used contained, at least originally, one dozen (except for one half-dozen box). I suspect that at this stage it was uneconomical to sell plates in smaller amounts.

Ilford HP3 plate test

The test above shows that the plates are quite low in contrast, but there is little age deterioration beyond a loss in sensitivity. I rated the plate at 40 EI with three successive exposures, giving effective exposures of 40, 20 and 10. I shot some of the HP3 plates at night with my Voigtländer Avus where the low contrast was an advantage, but having three boxes of 36 plates, I was happy to divert some of the plates from my night photography project, and shot some with the Ica Trona handheld, rated 50, which I used to illustrated my post on the camera.

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot with Voigtländer Avus

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot with Voigtländer Avus

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot handheld with Ica Trona 210

Sources/further reading
Company details from Early Photography
Ilford Chronology on Photomemorabilia