Flowerfield

For some reason I seem to be drawn to photographing this building in winter light (see here, for example).  I stopped by last Saturday morning when I was out with the 4x5 TiTAN pinhole camera.  I liked the way the trees were framing the house and that morning winter light was casting lovely spooky shadows on the front.

Flowerfield, home of Northern Ireland's first ever dedicated Arts Centre way back in 1980.  I remember our Photographic Club meeting there just before I left to go to Uni in that God-forsaken land known as England.  Sure all's well and good now I'm back in the homeland - even if half of England seem to have followed me here...  Fompan 200 rated at 50iso, tray developed in ID-11 1+2 (11 mins) on MGV, if you care about such things.

It got a bit of a crop from 4x5 in the darkroom, to 6x12 proportions.  I've always fancied a 6x12 camera but to be honest I've too many cameras as it is and I doubt one more is going to make me a better photographer.  So I'll stick to cropping from 4x5 or 6x6 when the want is there.  When I see those formats written here I'm thinking it's so misleading, as we're talking 4x5 inches versus 6x6 centimeters.  Not exactly helpful, is it?  The Europeans have a slightly different equivalent to 4x5 - namely 9x12 which is metric cm.  But, as I found to my cost when I was starting out in LF photography a few years ago, 9x12 is not the same as 4x5.  Yes, I found that out the hard way when my 4x5 film didn't fit snugly in my newly acquired 9x12 film holder.  

But back to discussing the relative sizes of 4x5 inches versus 6x6 centimetres versus 35mm.  Since two of those formats are metric lets roll with that.  So compared to 35mm (with frame size 36mm x 24mm), a frame of 6x6 film occupies roughly 3.6 times the area.  (I say roughly since not all 120 cameras produce negatives of exactly 6cm x 6xm - Hasselblad, for example, is closer to 5.6 x 5.6 but let's put that aside for the moment).  Anyway, I measured one of my 4x5 negatives and the actual frame size came out at 12.2cm x 9.5cm, about 3.6 times the area of a 120 Hasselblad negative.  

In conclusion - and I apologise for all the nerdy numbers here but that's the mathematician in me coming out - a frame of 4x5 film is roughly 3.6 times the area of a 120 negative which is roughly 3.6 times the area of a 35mm negative.  So a fairly uniform progression as you go from 35mm to 120 to 4x5.  Are we any the wiser after all that?  All I can say is that when you look at the three sizes in your hand, or in the darkroom, a 4x5 negative is HUGE and a 35mm negative is TINY.  And it's really amazing how much you can enlarge a good 35mm negative - I've 20"x16" prints made a very long time ago from 35mm negs which look absolutely great.