After
the recent successes at Duncan's Cove, I was enthusiastic to do more
work, and when this day dawned sunny and bright, I was ecstatic, as
Marieke had committed time to work with me in the afternoon. Initially
we had planned to work at her apartment, but given the brilliant spring
light, we headed off to photograph outdoors.
4"x5" film |
Over
a period of about 90 minutes, Marieke and I worked in a small circle of
woods, exposing 16 sheets of 4"x5" and a full roll of 35mm infra-red.
Of that, however, little worked. With the infra-red film, it was simply a
matter of insufficient infra-red radiation. Though there was lovely
warm sunlight, the air was cool and, when the wind didn't blow, it was
pleasant enough. I suspect it was still early enough in the Spring so
that most of the IR radiation was screened out by the angle of the
earth. Regardless of the reason, however, it was only the extreme
over-exposed frames which had any images on them at all - the best image
of the day, to the left, received about sixteen times more light than I
usually use for infra-red images.
4"x5" film |
Of
the 4"x5", not much was successful; due to the chill air, I'd given
Marieke my dark-cloth to keep the wind off between the exposures. The
dark-cloth is used when focusing the view camera, and I used my sweater
instead to shield the ground glass. This worked well for the focus, but
failed totally where composition was concerned; almost every image
suffered from lack of careful checking, and, while some wouldn't have
worked anyway, a few we made with trees are sadly unusable because
fingers or elbows were cut off by the edge of the frame.
35mm infrared film |
On
the whole, while it was disappointing to produce so many images and
have so few work, the infra-red image more than makes up for the
failures. I am becoming somewhat amused by my affinity for flare. I
have five top of the line Nikon lenses, but my favourite piece of glass
to work with on my 35mm camera is a cheap Vivitar 19mm - gotta love the
flare!