More format thoughts

One of the (many) challenging things as you grow older is dealing with deteriorating eyesight. I've been quite short-sighted since my pre-teen days but have never found that much of a problem beyond my glasses preventing me from seeing the whole viewfinder with some SLRs and all 35mm rangefinders. For about 25 years I wore contact lenses but can't be bothered with the hassle nowadays, especially since giving up squash which was my main reason for wearing them, fearing a wild swing by a playing partner might shatter them and cause me real eyesight problems.

The eye issue that's bugging me just now is the one of "floaters", those annoying shadowy shapes that float in and out of a person's direct point of focus. Normally, they're only rarely a nuisance and mostly go unseen. Lately, though, I have a particularly annoying one that seems to delight in settling on the point of focus of my dominant right eye. It's annoying enough that I've started to use my left eye when looking through the grain magnifier during printing.

I can usually get it to shift by moving my eyeball around but then run the risk of being called a swivel-eyed loon! So, rather than having people casting aspersions on my mental health, I went for the line of least resistance and have started using the old Nikon F90x with two autofocus lenses, the 35mm f2 AF-D and the 85mm f1.8 AF-D.

I think I've mentioned in the past what a high quality and versatile combination this outfit is and recent use has only confirmed that. If 35mm in general is easy and convenient then AF and matrix metering is doubly so. I know there will be a couple of large format practitioners (naming no names - the guilty know who they are) wondering if the F90x came with a McDonald's Happy Meal or from the bankrupt stock of Toys were Us but, as Father Ted might have said, I'm all out of fecks.

Photography, in my opinion, is about enjoying the process whilst striving for an image that matches or exceeds the visualisation made at the taking stage. I can achieve that to my own satisfaction with toy cameras like the F90x and LF would probably just increase the number of pointless, bland but technically superb photographs I'd take.

Of course, there are some photographs you need an LF camera for (architectural photography and, eh, architectural photography) but there are also many others that suit a 35mm SLR much more so. In fact, the pic at the top of this post was really only possible because I had an AF, matrix metering machine in my hand. I say "hand" because it was raining quite heavily the day I took it and there was no way I would have been standing out in that weather setting up a tripod with the Speed Graphic or SL66e on board.

However, having slotted the 85mm on the toy camera, I was able to venture outside with an umbrella in my left hand and the camera in my right confident that the AF would do its job just fine and the matrix metering would deliver the goods with no weird lighting to screw it up. And so it proved.

This has become one of my favourite photographs of the Perthshire village of Clunie, a regular childhood haunt of mine and one that I returned to again and again as an adult when I had a family of my own. The main attraction for me is the plethora of chestnut trees - our family have always been "conker" enthusiasts. Here's a bit of boring trivia: the chestnuts this year were the biggest I've encountered.

We used to have a wee competition to see who could find the biggest one so I know from previous years that 22g-23g is about as heavy as they normally get. Somewhat sadly now that our kids have all flown the nest, there was only Cath and I enjoying the sweet autumn air at Clunie this year so the fact that I picked up a 28g conker was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory. Still, a record is a record and one to tell the grandchildren about when our brood can stop working and playing long enough to actually get down to obeying the biological imperative.

The film for the Clunie shot, as for the others scanned and presented here, was Tmax 100, rated at an ISO of 200 (this is where all you "EI" nitpickers can jump in. Haha) and developed in ID11 1+1.  I didn't give it the recommended time (can't remember what that is now but probably around 11' 30" to 12') but agitated normally for 11' and then let it stand for 2' 30". That's a favourite method of Phil Rogers and a very handy tip as the resultant negs were just about spot on from my point of view.

Next up is The White Line. It was taken on the same miserable day as Clunie and was another hastily-grabbed shot but without the protection of an umbrella. The neg has plenty of shadow detail but I felt it needed to be quite dark to highlight the line and the wet tarmac. I'm not quite sure that I'd print it as dark as it it here.

Stepladder was a charming scene I stumbled across on Auchtermuchty Common in Fife. It's almost as I found it but not quite. The problem was that the stepladder was much closer to the tree trunk and actually overlapped part of it. There was so much undergrowth all around that I couldn't find a spot from which I could take a shot showing good separation between the ladder and tree. I eventually ended up moving the ladder closer to the camera position and still had to stand in amongst a thicket of brambles and tall weeds to get the shot.

The shot of the reflected telephone pole appealed to me because of the reflection in the big puddle and also the two fence posts mirrored in the smaller puddle. It's pretty standard fare for me, to be honest, with all the elements I like such as a little mist/drizzle, surface water and general dreichness.

All three of the photographs after Clunie were made with the 35mm lens and I've just realised the final one of Luthrie Church wasn't taken on the 85mm as I led you to believe at the start of the post but on a 70-210 Nikkor AF zoom. I'd forgotten about that.

Luthrie Church is yet another reminder for me why I prefer 35mm to other formats. Apart from the telephone pole shot, I wouldn't have taken any of the others had I been totting the Sl66e or a large format camera - the two rainy day shots because of the weather and the stepladder one because of the heavy undergrowth around the shooting position.

Luthrie Church was another 35mm only photo - at least for me. Aside from the fact that it was shot around the 150mm mark, it was another where the shooting position was key. The important bit of the photograph was the four spires and their relationship to the background. The spot where I'd parked the car - it was to the right of where I ended up taking the shot - gave me a good vantage point but the spires were somewhat lost in amongst the trees.

I had to walk about 100 yards down the road and through more tall - and wet - weeds on the verge to get to a sloping spot leading down to a fence. I was able to balance the F90x on a fence post which was just as well as the shutter speed was 1/60th. Again, there was really no place to set up a tripod and, with an LF camera, I don't think I'd have been carrying the 5x4 equivalent of a 150mm lens anyway.

I suppose, had I been in my 20s and a bit more adventurous, I might have tried taking the photographs in this post with the SL66e or the Speed Graphic, putting up with a soaking in the rain or possibly hacking away at weeds and brambles with the tripod legs to carve out a viable shooting position but I doubt it. The fact is that it's taken me far too long to realise that I'm a 35mm SLR man. I like the versatility of the 35mm SLR, the range of lenses, the convenience, the portability, etc. The rest is far too much like a really scratchy hair shirt for my liking.