A few prints from a special camera

I love a good, muddy field!

MILD SEXISM ALERT - liberal snowflakes look away now.


The arrival of Autumn heralds many different things. In my house, it seems to bring with it the urge to go back into the darkroom which I'm sure was never nature's intention.

Don't know about you but I've always found it difficult to disappear into a blackened room when it's sunny and warm outside. But now that the weather has turned a 1/60th at f4 it seems the most natural thing in the world.

It's coincided with my ongoing effort to organise my chaotic piles of negative sheets. I hate filing so this isn't a job that will be over any time soon but sorting through the negs has reminded me that there are a lot that I've never printed, albeit you've probably seen most of them here as negative scans.

A snowy scene in the Angus countryside from a couple of winters ago.

It became apparent to me as I held sheet after sheet up to the light box that some negatives looked particularly nice. In the same way that some women can reduce a man's knees to jelly with a "come hither" glance, they had that "come print me" look.

That doesn't mean that they were anything special from an "image" point of view (in the same way that the sexiest women aren't always the most beautiful) but they definitely invited some canoodling in the darkroom.

And then I started noticing a theme: many of these desirable negs had a tiny triangle of exposed emulsion breaking out of the 36x24mm picture area into the surrounding "rebate". You can see this in the small breaks in the borders of the prints posted here. One or two readers might, at this stage, be going, "Aaahh." Most will be wondering what I'm on about. For the uninitiated, that tiny triangle identifies the camera as a Konica Hexar AF.

For a reason unknown to me, Konica decided to put a small knick in the film gate of the Hexar AF so that a millimetre or two of surrounding rebate would be exposed at the taking stage. There are a few cameras that have such identifying marks, including some Hasselblads and the Fuji 6x9, but it's not a common feature. I've read all sorts of theories as to why some camera manufacturers did this from helping resolve copyright disputes to allowing the film to expand a little rather than buckling slightly under certain adverse conditions. Who really knows.

If you're brave, you can add it to a camera by judicious use of a jeweller's file but beware the very real risk of tiny shavings finding their way into the internal mechanism with potentially expensive results.

In my case, it helped identify the old ex-RAF as a camera that seemed to produce a negative with the right qualities for a nice enlargement. This was a little troubling to me as I've struggled to get on with the Hexar for many years. It has a great 35mm f2 Hexanon lens that I like a lot but has always been a candidate for EBay time because of some handling quirks. For these past few months, it has definitely been EBay bound as I promised myself that I'd fund the acquisition of the Mamiya Press outfit with the proceeds from the Hexar's sale. I think I paid a bit over £200 for the camera but it's now worth at least twice that sum.

When a camera - a 30-year-old electronic camera - attains that kind of value, I'm inclined to move it on rather than keep it and find out that a valuable asset has turned overnight into an attractive paper weight. And yet, I've still got the Hexar despite coming close on several occasions to parting with it. I suppose that says something about its qualities.

High up in the Carse Braes.

But back to the negatives. There was one in particular - again, nothing special as an image (It's the shot immediately below) - that had some nice tones and appeared sharp under the loupe. Well, I printed it and found it to be one of the sharpest 35mm pics I've taken. The film was Delta 100 which I think I developed in D76 1+1. It was printed through the second generation 50mm Focotar, the one known for its large front element, sharpness and flatness of field. I'm not ascribing any special input to the Focotar as there are other 50mm enlarging lenses that do just as good a job and, no doubt, one or two that are better. I include the information just for completeness.

The results got me exploring some other Hexar negatives and I started to realise that there was a good percentage of photographs taken with the camera that were among my personal favourites. For some reason, I just happened to like the look of many photographs produced by the camera. Please don't ask me to explain what I mean: I'd have a better chance of demystifying the Leica glow. I'm sure many readers will know what I'm on about, though. Sometimes a particular lens, film or developer just seems to give us exactly what we're looking for.

There's a good photo here - sadly, this isn't it. If I

could climb up to the second floor of a university

building behind me (as I took this pic) I'd get a

shot of a row of tiny Victorian cottages dwarfed by

the sprawling mass of the Wellcome Trust

research building.

The Delta 100, D76, Hexar AF combination seems to work especially well. I've never really used much Delta as I went from the likes of HP5, Tri X and FP4 to Kodak Tmax films with nothing to speak of in between apart from the odd role of Agfa APX or Adox CHS.

Tmax is excellent stuff with the slower version producing very fine grain and lovely smooth tones. However, it can look a little on the digital side in my opinion. The 400 speed film is more to my taste. Delta 100 isn't as fine grained as its Tmax rival but seems to have more bite for a look I prefer. A 6x9 print on 10x8 paper is very crisp indeed with just a hint of grain and quite punchy tones.

With excellent lenses at the taking and printing stages and careful development in a developer that doesn't mush up the grain too much, it can leave one wondering if there's much point to medium format. I don't mean that in the literal sense as MF will always have a technical advantage but more from a pictorial point of view.

If the 35mm workflow just described produces sharp, fine-grained and well-graded results is there really much to be gained from more of the same? And if there is then where do we stop? Ultra large format?