Hello all,
This is my first on this forum!
I recently bought a second hand Sinar Norma and a 90mm Schneider-Kreuznach 90mm f/8 Super Angulon from Mr Cad in
London. I've never done large format photography before so everything here is new to me. The camera is a little old and
heavy but it seems like a great camera to learn and practice on. I've been reading a lot and have been learning the Zone
System. I tried to use it recently on some night shots around Tower Bridge and the Mayor's Office in London. Below is a
scan of my first 4x5 negative with no adjustments. The film is Fomapan 200:
Note: I say no adjustments but I had to scan the negative in two halves and stitch it together as my scanner is a
Canoscan 9000F Mk II. That's all I did.
The shot was taken of the East side of the bridge from the South Bank at around 10pm a couple of weeks ago (late July or
early August 2015). I used a Sekonic L308-S lightmeter which doesn't have a spot meter that works on a very specific
location. I metered the shadow area under the bridge at 15s @ f/4 and the highlights at the top of the tower at 15s @
f/22. It seems to me like there's more than 5 stops difference between the shadows and bright lamps here but I am not
experienced enough to know how many by eye. To place the shadow area under the bridge in Zone III, I dropped two stops
to 15s @ f/5.8 and converted this to 120s @ f/22 because I wanted more depth of field. I remember reading somewhere that
reciprocity failure for Fomapan was terrible. I'd written down some user-given compensation times in my notebook of x3 @
1s, x9 @ 10s, x18 @ 100s. Not wanting to stand around for too long I eventually went back to 15s @ f/8 and added a x9
multiplier for reciprocity compensation giving me 135s @ f/8. When it came to development (also my first 4x5 developing
ever) I mixed 109g of powdered D-76 with 1L of water (stock dilution) and developed for 5.5 minutes based on similar
results on Massive Dev Chart. I consulted the Zone Scale compactions page from Steve Simmons' Using the View Camera and
chose a standard development because the meter said that there was a 5 stop difference between shadows (now zone 3) and
my highlights (now Zone 8) and I figured that I didn't need any contrast adjustments.
The end result was the picture above. It's obviously overexposed in the highlights but I'm happy with the shadow detail
on the bricks and the water and the underside of the bridge and the nice moody clouds. It seems my exposure calculations
were in the right ball park but I'm not sure about the cause of my error for the highlights. It's very probably that
they were actually brighter than my meter reading due to not having a 1 degree spot meter or not aiming it accurately -
you just point in the general direction with the L308. Other than that, have any of the assumptions or calculations I've
described above been incorrect, or were there any technical mistakes that you can spot? Is it the case that with long
exposures it's very difficult to not get blown highlights and I should have made a decision to lose some shadow detail?
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