Cwm Bychan

Posted by John Kiely (Manchester, United Kingdom) on 23 February 2012 in Landscape & Rural.

These images were shot to fill some gaps in my Cwm Bychan series. Luckily I like working in typically Welsh weather, rain, of which there was a lot during this week. Because of this I left the digital Hasselblad firmly tucked up in my van and took out the Mamiya RZ 67 with a film back. Yo know how sometimes when things change you can forget to check the obvious? Well that happened to me on this day. Its been a while since I shot on 6x7, it was cold and wet so I was concentrating on keeping the camera as dry as possible so when I took the light readings and they seemed long I was’t overly surprised, after all it was very poor light. I worked for about four hours, regularly checking the meter and the lighting was reasonably consistent.

The following day I started to shoot, checked the meter and immediately spotted my mistake from the previous day. Because the lighting was so even, and the wet ground was a bit too reflective I had just taken ambient meter readings. I had ensured that the cone was in the raised position, I use a Sekonic L-508, but what I didn’t notice was that the spot meter was selected, and the lens cap was on! So everything was over exposed by at least three stops.

The solution to this - stand processing. If you have ever tried this then it can be worrying. I presoaked the film for 5 mins then added Rodinal at 1-50, agitating for 30 secs then left it untouched for 40 mins before stopping and fixing. This still produced pretty dense results, but could still be scanned. The next film I reduced the dev time to 20 mins, which produced better tones. The rest of the films were dev’ed for 15mins, which is only 3 mins longer than the time that I used for conventional developing, so you can imagine just how over exposed theses were. What I have realised after this is I have become too dependent on histograms on the Hasselblad back, and have become too relaxed at checking equipment.

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