The Beauty of Surprise from a Ricoh GR1

Finally got round to processing  more odd rolls I have scattered around the darkroom. I’m sure this is how everyone works – isn’t it?

I delayed this gratifiction so long I had no idea what was on this roll of HP5+.  It is only by looking at the shots that I worked out the camera I’d used. It was from a Ricoh GR1 which I have the habit of carrying with me  everywhere and then forget to use. It’s a cracking little pocket  camera with a great fixed 28mm lens. On this occasion I remembered to fire off a few shots of Ian Marchant, Bob Machin and Paul Williams as we attended Todd Rungren’s  A Wizard, a True Star gig in Hammersmith Apollo in Feb 2010. The digital shots were up the next day but these have fermented like fine wine to produce some arthouse shots of a few old boys on a night out.

Processed in Rodinal 1+50 for 10mins which turned out to be too long and so a bit over processed. On this occasion the grainy look seems to work. I gave them a cream tone in Lightroom because these cats deserve it.

Large Format – Wista VX with Nikon 120mm Macro

It’s time to keep the blog ticking over which has been rather over taken by photos on Facebook and music on Soundcloud. I was tidying up today with a view to doing some more large format stuff when I came across a couple of dark slides that I reckoned contained some film, so with the sun shinning I thought I’d use them up.

I lugged all the 5×4 gear downstairs and gathered together  the things you need to make large format happen. ……Wista VX, Nikon 120mm Macro, meter, magnifying glass, the darkslides and big cloth to stick my head under. Two dark slides means only four shots so I shot a what I think may be a weed, the leaves of the apple tree before I stumbled on the spiders web. I haven’t done this for a while but slowly the steps came back as I went along. After half hour I could contemplate the four large negatives I might be seeing shortly.

Into the darkroom to set up three trays to develop and then turn off all the lights for 8 minutes.  I take the film from the slides by hand and then put gloves on to shuffle them in the chemical trays.  I’d forgotten how unsettling being plunged into such absence of light can be. With the water gurgling it is like being in the belly of the beast and it’s best to keep the monsters of the id well under control.  After what seemed like an age I was able to turn the lights on at the fix stage and see I had four successful snaps.

Only putting three up and I find I am plagued by the dust demons again. I wanted to see if I could make the pictures bigger as someone had the temerity to complain about their size in the previous blog. The charmless have found a real home on the internet. Anyway it adds a couple of steps but it seems I can increase the size. If anything they seem too big now so more experiments are required.

Here they are below scanned with the Epson V700. Processed in Rodinal 1+50 for 7 mins @ 22 degrees. I gave them a sepia tone to which I am addicted.