Last summer we visited another part of Indonesia we haven’t had the chance to visit yet. And one good thing about this country, is that a lifetime is not enough to visit entirely. So to Tana Toraja we went. Here are a few pictures I started top process after scanning them. Next step is to go to the darkroom and print them. As usual, the markets are some of the best place to take picture of people.
Over November and December 2021, city of Massy (France) held a coupe of photo related event. The main course was a two days exhibitions of productions from the local photo club. One of the side event was a visit of the local mosque which had a photo exhibition from Jean-François Noel. Here are a couple of picture I took during this visit. Light condition was not great at all, but with a Rolleiflex, you can shoot at 1/40 and still get something sharp enough.
Some scans of film. With little processing (mostly dust removal). This is in preparation of printing them with cyanotype.
Some forest wander with the Washi S film loaded in the Fuji 690GSW. This is a kind of rendering that I particularly appreciate. There’s basically no post processing in these pictures. I’m eager to see what I’ll get under the enlarger.
I must say I love going for a walk in the forest or more generally in the countryside. For this little series, it was at the end of the first locked down from March to May 2020. There was still restrictions, we couldn’t go more than 100km from our place. Since my parents lived about 200km away, we decided to meet in the middle. luckily there’s a beautiful region at this place called Perche. So we spent the day walking in a beautiful forest. I think it was also one of the first time I took out my Rolleiflex, and I’m quite pleased with the result.
Let’s talk about something different today. I got hand on a quite old hp5+ can of 35mm. The one with the green lid and the film can itself is black with green font, can’t find when they changed this, but I’d guess so it is at least expired for 20 years. Since it was an expired film, I wanted to use it in an unconventional way, and decided to put it in the back of my Mamiya RB67 with some adapters an shoot some panoramic pictures. When you do that, of course you also expose through the sprockets as there’s no mask for 35mm. Some likes it and some don’t. I kinda like the aesthetic of it. And here we are for a quick sessions in the garden. Framing is of course not accurate unless you draw the lines on the ground glass. Actually the RB67 ground glass has several vertical lines, and this helps a lot.
Now for the developing part, I didn’t do anything special, probably extend a little bit the time compared to the recommended, but not that much, maybe one minute. This explain why it comes out with a low contrast. And actually, this kind of contrast for subjects like flowers and other vegetal is something I’m looking for. Still I added a bit of correction in Gimp, just to get some darker tones in the shadows. Basically taking the curve in the middle where there’s the most mid tones and pulled it to lower values. A few adjustments with a brush in soft light mode and that’s it.
