It’s Magic

I’ve been reading a mystery series about a nurse turned coroner named Mattie Winston. The characters often eat at an Italian restaurant where the owner does magic tricks table side while diners wait for their meal. Cool idea, but I recently did my own magic trick.

I developed film. This magic trick meant my standing in a totally dark room loading film and then pouring chemicals in and out of a light-tight cylinder. After 15 or so minutes, I was able to take the lid off and reveal the negatives I exposed almost a week ago. I hadn’t done this in 15 or so years and it didn’t lose a bit of its charm. Seeing that negative image, translating that to what I saw on my left-right reversed ground glass, and saying that “yes, it is what I wanted to make” is a Eureka moment. Actually, it’s close to but not quite what I wanted. I was using infrared film for the first time, and I’ll have to learn how to deal with its inherent contrast and not blow out the highlights. 

This adventure was even cooler because it was my first time seeing photos with my new to me but very old Mamiya RB67. I picked a stream in some woods that I drive by every time I come or go from my neighborhood. It’s a scene that catches my eye in the right light. The high contrast of the infrared photo helped me share that with you. I can’t wait to make more.

If you’re interested, here are the technical details: I used a 90mm lens on a Mamiya RB67. My exposure was f/11 at 1/15th of a second determined using a Reveni Labs spot meter and Nick Carver’s precision metering method. (I placed the sunlit green grass slightly above neutral grey.) The film was Rollei Infrared 400 with a 720nm filter that required a 4 stop filter factor. Yep, the effective ISO was 25! I developed the negative in Rodinal mixed 1:25 for a minute longer than the recommended 10 minutes and 30 seconds as my makeshift darkroom was cooler than normal. I then made two digital photographs of the negative using a macro lens on my Nikon Z7 at the base ISO of 64. I stitched those together and inverted the negative in Photoshop and used Lightroom Classic to apply an S curve to adjust contrast.