Grain – tim dobbs photography

Garw Valley Railway with an F100 & some HP5 @ 3200…..

The weather this weekend here in the South Wales valleys has been awful, Dark & very wet.

A walk up the mountain was out of the question but as luck would have it the Garw Valley Railway had an open day so knowing from past visits the light inside the shed was very low I loaded the Nikon F100 with some HP5 and pushed it to iso 3200 and used the AF-s 50mm f1.4.

Even shooting at 3200 I was having to open up the lens to f2.8 or wider to get a reasonable shutter speed so the sharpness I managed to get was pretty impressive.I have pushed HP5 before and I knew that the contrast/grain it produces would suit the type of subjects I was shooting.

The only disadvantage to pushing this much was losing the highlights but it didn’t spoil any of the shots really.I processed the film in Ilford ilfotec HC 1+15 dilution for 11 minutes agitating twice every minute which managed to keep the grain well in check while giving excellent sharpness.

HP5 is such an excellent film stock its so versatile in in my personal opinion looks better when pushed than box speed but I love deep blacks and contrasty/grainy images so it suits me.

I had 3 frames left when I got home and fired them off in the house wide open just as a test and to finish the roll so I could see the results.

The combination of the F100 and the af-s 50mm f1.4 is great the focus is spot on and the lens is so sharp. Thanks for looking

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You can also find me at https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/ which is all film only loveliness …

Shooting some Ilford HP5+ that expired back in 1995…….

A few weeks ago my very, very kind cousin gave me a huge bundle of film all of which had expired over various dates.

One of the oldest was a roll of HP5+ that expired back in 1995, as none of the film had been either fridge/freezer stored for quite a while I was expecting pretty hit or miss results but I love the unexpected.I loaded up my Mamiya 645 and popped out to see what I would get.

I exposed as if it was 200 iso and processed accordingly using ilfotec HC 1+47 dilution for 8 minutes and the negatives came out fine at 1st sight.But on close inspection the sharpness and contrast were just fine but the grain in the lighter areas was pretty soft and mushy, not that I minded it was fine and towards the end of the roll the circles of the paper backing were evident in 2 of the frames.As you can see in this crop…Nevertheless I was really impressed with the film, I love grain and contrast and this roll had not really lost either, I could have most probably developed a little longer and got it even more contrasty.I love HP5, its my goto film most of the time and even if it expired 20 years ago its still great in my book…… thank goodness that Ilford are still flying the flag for film.Thanks for looking

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You can also find more film goodness over at my “Film Only” blog at:

https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/

Testing Nikon 35mm f1.8 AF-S DX on full frame ……

I love the 35mm focal length when shooting. I have various 35mm lenses to fit my old film slr’s but the only autofocus 35mm I have is the Nikkor 35mm f1.8 AF-S which is a DX lens and when I shoot with it on my D7000 it behaves like a 50mm approx. which isn’t really what I like so the lens even though very sharp stays in my bag most of the time.I have tried it on my full frame D600 and as long as I turn off auto DX mode it works great and the only real Vignetting occurred from f4 onwards and was easily sorted with lens correction in Lightroom.

I like Vignetting especially when I shoot contrasty B&W film so I decided to load up my F100 with some HP5 rated at 800 to see how the lens performed.The results were really pleasing and as the day was pretty overcast and quite dark I rarely shot above f5.6 so the Vignetting was almost no existent and the images were lovely and sharp/contrasty which is why I love HP5.I was thinking about getting the Nikon 35mm f2 AFD to shoot on my F100 and F4 but the results with this little lens really impressed and gave me the look I like with my B&W I would recommend this little gem highly especially as it is so affordable. Thanks for looking

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I also have a film only blog over at https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/ if you want to take a peak 🙂

First attempt at pushing Film ……

After reading some stuff on the internet and viewing some samples I decided to give B&W push processing a go.

Most of the articles I read used Kodak Tri-x so that is what I used to.

Using the Massive Dev chart app on my iphone http://www.digitaltruth.com/ I determined that I needed to develop for 10 minutes in ilfotec ddx 1+4 if I pushed the film from 400 to 800 which I thought was a good starting point just incase pushing it any faster may result in a ruined negative.

The weather today here in the South Wales valleys was pretty poor, dark and wet so it needed at least 800 iso.

I shot most of the roll outside with pretty random subjects, just looking for something with detail and contrast and finished the roll indoors using just lamplight.

The results were great, the grain was almost identical to Tri-x shot at its native speed. To be honest if you didn’t know that I pushed the film I could have told people they were at 400iso.

I really like the results I am getting using ilfotec ddx it seems to give a really good balance between sharpness/contrast and minimal grain.

Just for the record all these shots were taken using my Nikon F90x and nikkor 50mm f1.8.

I will try pushing it to 1600 or 3200 next time as I like grain in my images and 800 is definitely not a problem for the film/dev combination.

Thanks for looking

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