Time Exposure (Long)...
Large-format for night photography
Every weekend and daily during festive seasons the church which overlooks where we live, here in Preuilly-sur-Claise, is illuminated from dusk to midnight and again from around 5am until dawn. It's an imposing church with much of it, although not the bell tower which fell and was rebuilt a century or so ago, dating from 1002.
Although five banks of spotlights light up all sides of the church there are only a couple of angles from where photographs showing the full height of the tower can be made. Luckily the best angle is only a few yards from our front door so it's very easy to get out with photography in mind and have a tripod and camera erected at literally a minute's notice.
With night photography I alternate between using miniature 35mm and large format... and with "large" I have a practical choice of using either 4x5 or 5x7 inch formats. The impractical choices range between various "plate" formats on my collection of oldies including Kodak Century, Sands Hunter and a Gandolfi 16x12 inch which would stretch the "one minute set-up" time by half an hour or more... actually they would be impossible to use within an hour, so I had better not fool myself or any curious readers!
The easy choice is to use a 35mm Nikon... and I again have a choice of either 28mm or 35mm "perspective control" lenses which offer rising front to enable the tops of high buildings to be included in the frame without having to tilt the camera upwards. This avoids the unsightly visual effect of the building subject appearing to be falling backwards.
Of course most view cameras have the "rising front" feature built-in so that perspective control can be used with any lens that has enough angle of coverage. But the big plus with large-format is the negative size which can be used for alternative printing processes.
With this cyanotype image I used a 5x7 inch Lotus Rapid View camera with my ex-John Sexton 210mm Nikkor lens. This sounds at first like a long focal length lens but 210mm is the "standard" lens focal length on the 5x7 inch format seeing more or less the same as a 50mm "standard" lens on the miniature 35mm format. Because the lower area of the picture was so dark and contained no detail I cropped much of it out reducing the format to roughly 4x5 proportions.
The original exposure was around two minutes on Bergger 200 sheet film developed in PMK Pyro... I use PMK Pyro developer for this type of shot because it doesn't block up the highlights of the negative... so the stonework shows printable detail making both conventional black-and-white and "alternative" cyanotype printing methods easier. The constellation of stars visible in the inky sky doesn't exist... they're simply blemishes which haven't been spotted-out on the print!
8:25:19 PM 
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