Last weekend I went to visit my sister in Tuscaloosa Alabama. On Sunday I had the chance to visit Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham Alabama. Unfortunately a storm was moving in so I had limited time. The exterior of the old plant had nice lighting but the interiors were very dark even close to windows for the 100 speed film I had on hand. Some areas had no roof so the dull even lighting from the sky offered more open compositions than there might usually be.

There was one part of the interior machinery that caught my eye and it had lighting from a nearby window. I metered the brightest thing i could see in the near darkness and it was EV3 which is the lowest my spot meter can measure. I knew that item wasn’t pure white and guessed it to be about 1.5 to 2 stops brighter than the main object I wanted to capture but still keep the dark moody atmosphere. EV3 would mean a standard exposure of f22 for 1 minute, so I opened up a stop to f16 and added 30 seconds for good measure. Then I thought about reciprocity and calculated the exposure to be around 4 minutes. Part of me wanted to let it run for 7 minutes but the storm was moving in fast and the wife indicated it was time to go.

Focusing and composing was difficult in the low light and I could only see the brightest nearby object  and one barely discernible far object and picked a spot in between. I also chose a 65mm lens to make sure I captured the full area I wanted. What I didn’t know at the time was that the film placement in the holder was such that the bottom would be closer to the edge than expected. It will need some cropping. A new tip I have learned from other LF practitioners is to use a flashlight to aid in focusing or to put a cell phone with lit screen in the scene. I had neither that day.

I processed the film as a single sheet using  Pyrocat M 3.5/3.5/500 for 16minutes (N+30%ish) at 70*. When I removed the film after processing and washing for 5 mins I found that I did indeed have a thin negative in the deepest shadows but there is contrast in the gears and metal parts I wished to capture. So it should have all the info necessary for a good print. Inverting the negative in PS I found it was much brighter than I was seeing so may have to get a little creative while printing to maintain the moody feeling of the dark interior.

The 3 negative images below show what I captured that day and the different lighting conditions.  Iphone capture on lightbox converted to b&w only, no adjustments in PS.

Left – Exterior normal overcast lighting EV 8.4-13.7, ZoneV placed at EV10.6 – f22.5 0.5 sec (Dev N12:30)

Center – dark interior window lit EV3 + best guess – f16 4mins (Dev16mins)

Right –  interior machinery with dark overcast open sky lighting EV 3-8.7 interior, sky was EV13.5, ZoneV placement at EV 5.7-   f22 8secs metered + 6secs reciprocity =14secs (Dev 14mins N+12%  to expand interior tones).

Note: the Film for the shot on the right is Delta 100 vs FP4 for the others so it tend to get more base stain. I may need to reduce part B in the future for Delta.