Tuesday, October 13, 2009
For many years I have put all my photographic eggs into the medium format basket. This means that I have taken most of my photographs with a Mamiya RB-67 with its 6x7 cm transparency or negative. Whenever I hold a 35mm camera, even that extra heavy tank that my Nikon F-3 with a motor drive is, I feel I am holding a toy. When all my printing happened strictly in the darkroom there were many negatives and transparencies that never saw the light of day. Now I like to make myself a large and strong cup of tea and look at some of my negatives wit a loupe. I am putting an extra effort into looking at pictures I took with those “small” cameras. Often the best excuse for using a 35camera (and still is) was its ability to let me shoot unburdened by a cable to a flash system. There was another excuse and that was Kodak Infrared b+w film. Alas it has been discontinued!
If you overexposed it a bit (or a lot) you got light going through the film and bouncing back from the pressure plate in the camera. The effect was a light halo in dark areas. The effect was and is called the halation effect. Many film manufacturers in an effort to “improve” the film started putting anti-halation layers on to their film base. Luckily Kodak never tried to do that with their infrared film of which I have about 35 rolls left in my fridge.
Kodak b+w Infrared
More Infrared
and more