mercredi 24 novembre 2004

Forte and the Fall Good products... poor marketing It got harder today to find any idea to write about... the day started off on the wrong note when the month's fire wood didn't arrive. It's the Fall... it's getting cold... and there was fog last night so damp is permeating the fabric of life. We need longer lengths of wood for the open fire in our living room and I need shorter lengths to keep the kitchen stove alight day and night. It warms the far end of the house which has a lot of window area looking into the courtyard garden... so gets cold easily at this time of year... and life is miserable in the Fall without warmth... or hot food. The second blow was a jammed Nikon. I'd been shooting a roll of Fortepan 400 which was a new film to me from Forte Photochemical Industrie, Vác, Hungary... when everything went black. The mirror of the F2 jammed up as the shutter button was pressed... the shutter didn't open... nothing would operate... no shutter... no mirror return... no wind-on... nothing! For a specialist (someone like Marty Forscher in New York) to repair a mechanical Nikon F2 could cost a lot of money but the work would be impeccable and last almost forever. Nikon's own repair facilities wouldn't be interested because Japanese companies are obliged by law to repair a model type for only ten years after it has ceased production... and the F2 ended manufacture around 1980 so I'm about 15 years too late. And I wouldn't trust a general camera repairman to use matching quality components in work that would be hidden from view until the next break occurred sooner rather than later. The roll of Fortepan 400 was quite old... the expiry date on the box was, like my broken F2, past it's best to put it mildly. I've been using up a few old films this week because money's tight, I'm not in the mood for pretending to make art... and I like to give my foto-faculties a bit of exercise every day to make sure they know what to do if or when I next get a paying job. The instruction sheet gave no indication of processing times... just that Hungarian-brewed Forte FD-20 happens to be similar to D-76. Having everything but on my darkroom shelves I thought about Stöcklers 2-bath (very forgiving), Agfa Rodinal (bit finicky), PMK Pyro (always promising), D-76 (no time... would have to prepare it from powder), or Xtol (seems to work with any mono film). So hardly being in the mood Kodak's Xtol got the nod. From hundreds of previous rolls of various fast ISO 400 films I've settled on a routine with Xtol at 1+1 (stock plus water) of 10 minutes at 20°C with 5 seconds agitation every half minute (couldn't be simpler really and I can remember without ever having to look it up). I calculated that as the film was past its "use by" date a 20% increase in processing time would help rather than harm it's development. It seems a tad strange actually to get too precise over these things because most films and developers are quite forgiving of exposure and processing errors... and as I hardly ever use an exposure meter I only have myself to blame when negatives don't produce the prints I'd hoped for... and anyway I can get something nice looking from most negatives if I have to after 40 years or so dodging around in darkrooms. However, this time, no worries and I got the combinations pretty close because the negatives looked good when dry... not too flat... nor too contrasty... they would have been just right for Goldilocks! I don't expect marvels from East European materials... they are great for the price... and I think well worth using for the characteristics and signature they have. But if I have a paying job to shoot I use, in alphabetical order, Agfa, Fuji, Ilford or Kodak... there are no unknowns with these manufacturers and their products. But, I must say that East European manufacturers obviously have poor marketing rather than poor products... because the first Forte negative I scanned produced the "Feather & Leaf" image above which, on my monitor, would be hard to tell apart from a similar carefully composed image shot on a 5 x 4 view-camera. The only similarity was that I used my favourite quirky set-up of an old Nikon PB-4 tilt-and-shift bellows with a pre-set 105mm Nikkor Bellow lens. It's not an easy set-up to use but I often challenge myself with it (except out in the street!) and usually hand-held too... this time the subject was lying on the surface of the small pond I bought for birds to splash around in. The tilleul leaf had fallen onto the water's surface earlier in the morning... and I'd found the pigeon's rain-spattered feather in the neighbouring churchyard... I didn't think much about the composition of the two elements as a slight breeze was making the tissue-like tilleul leaf drift to and fro making the shot I wanted more a matter of chance than choice. The fastest shutter speed I could use was 1/250th of a second with a shooting lens aperture of about f/5.6 in the weak but direct sun... so I tilted the front lens panel of the PB-4 Bellows to bring more into focus without having to stop the lens down more... you photographers out there will know all about the Schiempflug principle of aligning subject, lens and film planes for maximum overall sharpness. And that was about it for today's photography... I made a nice looking image from several unknowns... the biggest unknown being the cost of the F2 repair if I decide to go ahead... and we still have no wood delivered... and it's a clear, cold night with a fullish moon... and when it's this cold I don't like the Fall even if it is a beautiful time of the year. 9:23:04 PM    comment []