July 5-8 2018:
For the 45th year of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I cooked up an idea to photograph it with 4 by 5 inch black and white film, because you know, it all clicks. And we would do forty five of them!
So I walked around the festival site at Birds Hill park with my view camera going into all the areas I could; backstage, festival camping, the RV village, and because the camera was mahogany and brass and red leather, people stopped me and wanted to talk about the camera. This project was not just about taking photos; I was a performance piece all by myself, and people were full of questions about how the old fashioned looking camera worked and if it was just for show. The Wisner does look like it’s from the Victorian era, but it was made about 20 years ago.
The whole shooting, talking, photo performance really did work, and I only messed up a couple of exposures, and here they are for you to see. But I did do more than 45 frames. I took more shots just to be safe, and ended up with 53.
The whole photo taking experience was turned around and I became the focus and topic of discussion which was what I thought would happen. And I loved talking about the history of photography, optics, the Victorian era and letting people look through the ground glass on the back of the camera to see the world projected on it up side down, because that’s what those old cameras do. It’s magic!
For the photo nerds out there, I used:
Ilford HP5 400 ISO BW sheet film
Wisner 4×5 field camera
Lenses: Schneider Super Angulon 90mm, Schneider Apo-Symmar 180mm.
Hand Developed in Ilfotec HC for 7 minutes at 20c in 5 x 7 inch trays.
I thought the neg holders were clean, but a lot of dust showed up on the negs.
I attempted to be careful with them as I shuffled them around in the total darkness in the developing solution, the fix and the wash bath, but as you can see on the images there are copious scuffs, scratches and fingerprints. There are even light leaks and developer blotches from uneven immersion, but I like the old world Victorian feel of the images with all that added “character”. The photo of the volunteers backstage at LaCuisine is so scuffed and smudged that it looks like a beat up Civil War image!
I scanned them on an Epson V600 flatbed scanner as if they were opaque prints and not translucent negatives which also gave them an other worldly look which reminds me of Halation issues of early 20th century negatives. This method of scanning was done incorrectly on purpose and I quite like the dreamy look it produced. (Resolution: 1200 dpi, 16 bit)
The files were inverted in Photoshop and a lot of Clarity and Dehaze was applied to them in Lightroom to add some punch; and a tiny amount of blue was added to the shadows, and yellow to the highlights.
I have uploaded 3000 pixel files for you to peep at.
