As enlarged eyes looked very cool in my digital grain exploration I decided to make massive enlargements of eyes. Which means I went through my negatives, picked photos where the eyes were reasonably visible and enlarged them to fill a 30cm×40cm print. If you consider the size of a negative and the fraction of a negative filled by a person’s face, you realise that quite a bit enlarging is needed here. In many cases I had to go for the maximum enlargement I could do (restricted by the darkroom’s length when projecting horizontally across the room).

This massive enlargement had the disadvantage that exposure times skyrocketed. Usually the exposure time was between three and five minutes. Which is rather long. Particularly when keeping in mind that you may need to make a test print first to find out which exact exposure time and gradation you want to use. But after a few long evenings in the darkroom in winter, prints started existing and I eventually had a collection big enough to hang them.

Hanging the photos was an adventure in itself. I just wanted a ‘simple’ grid. And I decided to stick drawing pins into the wall and use tiny magnets to stick the prints to them. But getting the drawing pins in place was tricky. The house’s walls are somewhat non-straight once you start looking at them closely and it’s rather difficult to put a dozen drawing pins in a straight horizontal line into a wall three metres above the ground. At least it’s difficult if you don’t have professional tools for the task. But eventually that was done and the images are up:

Of course the whole thing is more interesting when seen for real. Then you can really tell the differences between the films (sharpness, grain size) and photos (blurriness due to longish exposure times or poor focusing), It’s also amazing to see how easily people recognise other people they know remotely when just seeing a part of their face.

And yeah, now I’m feeling watched when sitting in my room…

Watch a video of hanging the photos in the following post →

This one will be big.

I rather like this one.

Ilford HP-5 in Yashica Mat 124G, developed for 15 minutes in Adox ATM49 1+2.

Last time we were quite lucky with our guesses. And this time we were again. Perhaps even more so. The prints on canvas came out rather nicely and the prints on wood which we did later on – while not being as good – were still reasonable. We’ll just call any difference from being technically perfect ‘artsy’, right?

I just had to print this photo (scanned version) which I really like a lot on a canvas. And the result you see while it’s still wet above is rather good for the technique I think. The photo on wood looks cool as well. And it’s the same drama in the photo as in this one or this one.

My complete ignorance of the Czech language does make the Černobily on the Foma film package look a bit scary…

To start well, I did a bit of cleaning. I suspect that none of the equipment there has been cleaned. Ever. And on some of the projectors you can see the ‘shadows’ cast by dust somewhere in the machine on your prints. Which – at least for the mildly obsessive-compulsive – is a bad thing. And it meant I found myself disassembling some of the projectors – thus learning a bit about their inner working for the first time –, cleaning the dust out of them and noticing that we have two kinds of projector systems. There are ‘Western’ projectors (I think ours are from Italy) and ‘Eastern’ projectors from Checheslovakia. It seems you can exchange the lenses between projectors of the same type, but not between the different types.

And then I made my prints. Enlarging an eye to fill a 30cm×40cm sheet requires huge magnification. I needed to rearrange projectors to do that, placing one right at the wall and projecting the image on the wall opposite it. With a 70mm lens that gave an image height between three and four metres, leaving me with sufficiently large eyes. A few things were extra obstacles in this. With that massive enlargement, light intensity is really low. Which in turn makes it really hard to focus the image properly. Particularly as you cannot be close to the image and adjusting the focusing at the same time. Using a small aperture could have solved this, but I really didn’t want to go beneath f5,6 as even at that size I needed exposure times between 200 and 300 seconds (read: eternities) to get the results I wanted. Particularly for the first attempts with exposure testing being needed this just took ages.

But I got reasonable results in the end which give me a collection of eight eyes with a bit of face around them now. They can be nicely arranged in a pattern and arranged by brightness, for example. Apart from looking cool, they are also a nice example of the grain you get from different films. Going all the way from the Adox CHS25 film at ISO 25 which still looks reasonably smooth even at this size to HP5 pushed a stop to ISO 800 using low-dilution Rodinal which gives clearly visible grain.

Of course this whole process requires significantly more effort than sitting down with Photoshop. And its results can easily be less perfect because of technical constraints. But having the the final prints just feels better. For one thing because of their sheer size. And for the other because many of the steps involved in creating those pictures were done by myself.

And just in case I asked whether they could perhaps install those for me soon. Which, surprisingly, they could. Which in turn meant I could just drop the bike off there this morning and pick it up to go home with the new tyre and the lighting and some other issue fixed as well. That, in turn left me with plenty of time to go to the photo lab where many prints were made.

Having my newly developed medium format films with me – the second round came out quite well – I did some contact prints for those. What’s great for that is the 150m roll of 8cm wide paper. And I am more and more in love with that medium format thing. Even at contact print size you can actually recognise stuff in the prints. And the square format really is an interesting thing as well. I like it.

While I was at it, I made some contact prints of that really scratched and torn film from the Box camera as well. Those are 6cm×9cm format which is even larger. And they have those lovely rounded corners which look quite cool.

And just for the heck of it I let the Motofone F3 do a self portrait. I’ll leave it to your observational skills to figure out when that happened.

[ADOX CHS 25, developed in ATM 49 1+1,5 8min45sec]

Quite a bit of detail in the shot, btw. If you zoom into the railing at the top, you can still – easily – tell the vertical bars apart.

Too bad my shadow made it on there, but perhaps cropping it to a square might resolve that. And I have to admit that early morning light can be very nice. It’s just the time of the day that’s wrong…

[Photo taken on ADOX CHS 25 film, developed in ATM 49 1+1,5 8min25sec.]