Large format fail

I finally got out and about with the Sinar on Saturday morning - something I'd been wanting to do for some time now.  I drove down to my favourite car park by the Herring Pond in Portstewart and just as I got there the heavens opened.  I sat in the car a while, which seemed like the thing to do as there were a few other cars there, mostly with older people sat in them reading newspapers.  Clearly that's the thing to do on a Saturday morning, then - and who can blame them with the view they have in front of them, of Binevenagh, Derry and Donegal.

About 15 minutes later the rain moved on so I was able to provide them all with additional entertainment while I set up the tripod and mounted the Sinar, bit by bit - monorail first, then rear standard, front standard with lens already mounted and then bellows. Check that everything is zeroed - both standards are at their detente positions and there’s no tilt or swing applied. Screw in the long remote release cable, remember to open the aperture on the lens (f/5.6 on the 210mm, roughly equivalent to 60mm in 35mm- speak), open the iris and then it's composition and focus time.  Rather than a darkcloth, which I never seemed to get on very well with, I use a binocular reflex viewer mounted on a bag bellows, which attaches to the back of the rear standard.  It's not great as the bag bellows sags a bit which makes it difficult to see the whole image properly.  Sinar make a metal viewer as well and I might invest a few £ in one, since I think it would make the whole experience a lot better.

Here's a phone snap to show the Sinar locked and loaded, dark slide in and ready to rock.  As you can see the sky cleared quite quickly to blue, with a few nice clouds to add a bit of interest:

Outdoors in good light the reversed, upside-down image on the ground glass is bright and focus (by moving the back standard forward and back using a damped wheel) is pretty easy. When happy with composition and when focus is more or less correct then the viewer can be removed and a loupe used for fine focus tuning. I use an old 50mm lens from a a Practica which when reversed makes an excellent loupe. I have a cardboard collar taped on the front so the ground glass doesn’t get damaged. Ok so we’re nearly ready to take the shot. It’s a straight landscape with little in the foreground of interest so need for any tilt. Ready at last to take a meter reading. An incident reading indicated 1/250 at f/5.6. I took a spot reading off the darkest object (the black rocks in the foreground) which suggested 1/250 at f/2.8 so closing down 2 stops placing the shadows on Zone III would seemed to confirm f/5.6 as a decent shout. I also took a spot reading off the white clouds and although I didn’t write it down it didn’t indicate that the highlights would be off the scale, so no need to reduce development times.

The next steps are then to set the aperture&shutter speed on the lens and remember to close the iris before inserting the film holder and removing the darkslide.  I think I closed down to about f/16 which gave 1/15 of a second, taking off one additional stop for the yellow filter I was using.  Finally it's time to breathe, wait for any wind to die down and the shutter can be opened via the cable release.  

If you're thinking "Blimey what a palaver" you'd be right - it's a different world from 35mm or even medium format.  Perhaps that's the attraction - it's a chance to slow down and actually think about each shot carefully.  It probably takes as long to read this post as it does to actually perform the actions described. 

OK time for the print and then a post-mortem as to why it's so yucky:

Portstewart Bay, tray processed 4x5 FP4+ in RO9, Adox MCC paper

In the past when I've developed sheet film I've used an old Unicolor paper drum on a motorised base.  The paper drum has the ridges along the inside which are necessary to allow the developer to reach both sides of the film.  But lately I've been reading about the virtues of tray processing so that's what I did this time around, using old 5x7 trays that don't see much action these days.  I actually took two shots, just opening up the aperture by a stop for the second one on the grounds that slight over-exposure is nearly always better than under-exposure.  The basic idea is to shuffle the sheets, bringing the one on the bottom to the top every minute or so.  A bit of a pre-soak in plain water is advised to stop the sheets sticking together.  The primary risk of tray processing is scratches, since the corners of sheet film are sharp and are likely to cause terminal damage to another negative if they accidentally touch.  Of course all the processing happens in complete darkness and with your hands in the developer it's sensible to wear nitrile gloves. I did use the Massive Dev Chart app on my phone for the timing but it has a green light option which as far as I am aware is film-safe, although it does suggest turning the screen brightness down to the minimum.  I kept the phone behind me all the time, just turning around to press the Start button once the sheets were in the developer.  9 minutes in RO9 (1:25) goes pretty quickly under these circumstances.  A short stop bath and then into the fixer for 5 minutes - the lights can come on after 2 minutes or so but I waited for 3 minutes just to err on the side of caution.

The negs looked OK - there was good detail in both the shadow area and the sky (although I chose not to show the detail in the foreground rocks in the print) and once they were dry and under the enlarger the probe told me that contrast was acceptable so I ran off the print you see above. 

Although the detail in the headland is impressive, as you would expect from a negative of such giant proportions, the problem of general yukkiness would appear to stem from uneven development, which is most apparent in the sky area.  I'm guessing that my tray processing skills need a bit of honing - almost definitely too much agitation, perhaps other things going on as well.  I'm off to read a little more about the whole tray processing thing before trying again.  I'll keep y'all posted on how that goes...