Thread: Deep Time

Here, offered as an antidote to the rush of announcements of new new new things, are some old things ...

First ... Horsetail, a primitive plant that survives from the Paleozoic era and propagates by spores ... so they've been around for about 500 million years ... I've been photographing this clump for a few months now ...

20120917-2 by _loupe, on Flickr

Here we have some rock strata ... perhaps a geologist will come along to identify these for us, but they look like shale and some sort of sediment, and I photographed this on the "Jurassic Coast" of Dorset ... so perhaps a couple of hundred million years old ... that's right, the horsetail has been around longer ...

20120917-3 by _loupe, on Flickr

and lastly, a nice bit of seaweed ... well not so nice actually because I've just discovered it's Wireweed (Sargassum muticum) and is an invasive species native to Japanese waters rather than here ... so probably not so old, though it looks nicely primitive ...

20120917-4 by _loupe, on Flickr

... rather appropriately, these photographs are also about to become fossils, as the film with which they were captured (Adox CHS 25, also known as Efke KB25) has recently ceased production. It was an old-fashioned (pre-WWII) emulsion formula, very slow (25 ASA) and fine-grained, manufactured until about three weeks ago on machinery made between WWI and WWII; also appropriately, I made the photographs using lenses designed before WWII, and developed the film in a developer first formulated in the 1890s ...

Thanks! Love them all.

I get nostalgic and when I learn that Efke 25 has been discontinued. I am too lazy to pick up the old 4x5 mount it and start shooting with it. I don't have a dark room but your post spurs me on to buying a daylight developing tank but the pocket won't stretch to a scanner for 4x5 at the moment.

Nicely done. What camera are did you use? Interesting that your ASA 25 film produced such 'contrasty' photos. I can see how the time required for film and print can be quite relaxing.

Gary

Thank you Gary, Xuareb, Andrewtee.

Gary, these are scanned from 35mm negatives, so have been "hybridised" in Lightroom. I'm not set up to print or even make contacts, and I don't own a densitometer, so I couldn't tell you what the "real" contrast is like, but Efke25 was apparently known to be a high-contrast emulsion (The Internet says so, so it must be true)

LOL ... okay, I've never used Efke25, but with Kodak films the lower the ASA, typically, the lower the contrast.

Gary

PS- (A 'real' photographer would print their negatives. lol)
G

Yes, not only that but I developed it in a plastic tank in plastic reels ... A Serious Photographer would only ever use stainless-steel reels (I really did read that statement on another forum, and I am entirely sure it was meant quite seriously)

I only use stainless .. lol ... actually stainless allows for better circulation due to the stainless reels having less mass. Whether that increase in circulation is significant I don't know. But stainless is so much cooler than plastic.

Gary

yeah well another nail in my coffin as a lightweight trivial taker of snaps who can't be taken seriously

Originally Posted by pdh

yeah well another nail in my coffin as a lightweight trivial taker of snaps who can't be taken seriously

*slap* don't be silly!

Nice set, Paul :) My favourite is the rock formations. Looks shaleish to me but I'm not a geologist :)