Construction time again. Tri-X 4×5/320TXP @1000, Diafine, Orbitar 4×5 Wide Angle, Super-Angulon 1:8/65, 50 seconds, f27
Undaunted by the previous night’s debacle, I jumped into last night’s shoot with purpose. Tripod issues? Use a different camera (the very small Orbitar 4×5 Wide Angle). Film holders jiggling the camera? Use the Grafmatic. You get the idea. I wanted success, even if modest.
They say “write what you know,” and last night I shot what was in front of me, my five-year-old son building a helicopter and garage/garden/house with Lego bricks.
A flurry of activity. Tri-X 4×5/320TXP @1000, Diafine, Orbitar 4×5 Wide Angle, Super-Angulon 1:8/65, 50 seconds, f27
I’ve not had super results with the Orbitar hand-held. I had thought it might be neat as a large format street camera; I’ll keep working on that. In the meantime, mounting it to a tripod for long exposures worked very well.
A wider view. Tri-X 4×5/320TXP @1000, Diafine, Orbitar 4×5 Wide Angle, Super-Angulon 1:8/65, 50 seconds, f27
Again I metered with my Sekonic L-308S in incident mode. My exposure read 10 seconds, which turns into 50 seconds when taking the long exposure into account.
The following table is taken from Kodak’s data sheet for all versions of Tri-X:
| Kodak Tri-X: Exposure and development adjustments for long and short exposures | ||||
| If indicated exposure time is (seconds) | Use this lens-aperture adjustment | OR | This adjusted exposure time (seconds) | AND use this development adjustment |
| 1/100,000 | +1 stop | Adjust aperture | +20% | |
| 1/10,000 | +1/2 stop | Adjust aperture | +15% | |
| 1/1,000 | None | None | +10% | |
| 1/100 | None | None | None | |
| 1/10 | None | None | None | |
| 1 | +1 stop | 2 | -10% | |
| 10 | +2 stops | 50 | -20% | |
| 100 | +3 stops | 1200 | -30% | |
I think the results were excellent. Click on any of the photos to see the full-size scan. If you’ve developed with Diafine before, you know that the concept of adjusting development is kind of beside the point, so I did not do that. In fact, I lengthened development time because my chemicals were below 70F and I didn’t feel like warming them up.
Twice as many Davids to screw this up. Tri-X 4×5/320TXP @1000, Diafine, Orbitar 4×5 Wide Angle, Super-Angulon 1:8/65, 50 seconds, f27. Note that the bright spots at the top of the shot are bathroom lights–when I pulled the negative, I couldn’t imagine why 4×5 film had bromide drag from sprocket holes!
Development recipe:
No pre-soak
Diafine: 5 minutes in bath A, 4 minutes in bath B, 3 gentle inversions every minute
Water stop bath, 1 minute
4 minutes in TF-5 fixer, 7 inversions in 5 seconds every 30 seconds
10 minute rinse (5 minutes is all that’s necessary per TF-5 documentation, but I wondered if my last batch wasn’t washed long enough)
Photo-Flo 1 minute, stir agitation
Negatives scanned with Epson V700 scanner, inverted in Photoshop and black/white points set. No other adjustments or retouching whatsoever.
David Shoots Film 