So I was admittedly - since last October - sort of burned out on photography. Got back from a trip with Jeff from Yosemite and the eastern Sierra and, after developing the negatives, was disheartened by a couple of things. One was the fact that I had achieved exactly what I had set out to do, which was capture the "iconic" images of Yosemite - Half Dome from Glacier Point, El Capitan from the banks of the Merced River, the Valley View and so forth. Granted, I got a couple of decent shots, but that's where another reason for my disheartening of my photography came in. I had used my Mamiya RB67 for the first time that trip (well, OK, I had used it a couple of times before that and was really comfortable with it but never really developed anything spectacular from it). And, after developing the frames, I went to print some in my darkroom and the resulting prints were not very sharp.
Here's an example -
I was convinced the $40 Ciro-Flex TLR that I had picked up at a garage sale and used for all of my medium-format landscapes up until getting the Mamiya had incredible sharpness and detail from a tiny lens, and the über-expensive and huge Mamiya lenses were coming up short of that.
Here's an example from the Ciro-Flex -
Now, these are web images, but if you look close enough you
can see a difference between the sharpness of the two. And really, sharpness and detail are what make a landscape image above all else for me. That is why I never shoot 35mm and cannot wait to get into large-format. But that caused me to be really disappointed and to consider selling the Mamiya.
However, that all just changed this afternoon.
Had developed some negatives from a trip to Utah's Zion National Park and Nevada's Valley of Fire State Park earlier in the week and just got around to taking a look at them under the loupe on the lightbox this afternoon. I had thought perhaps it was the developer I had used on the rolls from Yosemite - Kodak D-76 at a 1:3 ratio (sort of the stock ratio). Now, D-76 is a fine-grain developer and what I had mostly used in the past on rolls from the Ciro-Flex (with the exception at times being Ilford ID-11), but what I was thinking I needed to try was a high-acutance developer in the hopes that would make a difference in the negatives from the Mamiya. So a trip to one of the last remaining camera stores that stocks film chemistry two weeks ago found myself picking up a bottle of Kodak HC-110 and ZONALPro GammaPlus high-acutance, fine-grain developer. I'd heard good things about the HC-110, but I shelved that for the time being and went for the ZONALPro. At a ratio of 1:12 (the standard working solution) and everything else constant (film - still Ilford FP4+, stop bath, fixer, temperature) I went to developing the negatives (while talking on the phone with a friend, a first for me but I didn't dump in fix when I meant to do stop or any other catastrophe!). Under the loupe, comparing them with frames from Yosemite I know looked soft when printed and frames from the Ciro-Flex I know where tack-sharp when printed, I instantly recognized a difference in the negatives just developed in the ZONALPro. And a remarkable and astounding difference it was! The negs are tack, über-sharp as I'd expect from a $3K camera system. So now I'm really excited - still have two more rolls to develop which I'll promptly do tonight. Then possibly scan them tomorrow or sometime during the week and get them posted to
my Flickr site.
This is an exciting day! Looking forward now to a good year of photography, and capturing some really awesome stuff on the trips I've got planned!
