I decided this term to do all my project work on film.  It’s the last term where project marks don’t actually count towards my final degree grade, so I decided to try the remaining techniques that I want to try ahead of my final year: film, colour printing, and large format.

Large format is slow and expensive, so for reconnaissance I decided to use my Bronica SQ-A, which is medium rather than large format.  I discovered that printing colour contact sheets is a huge pain compared to printing black and white, so I decided to scan the negs in for a sort of digital contact print.

A nice feature of medium format is that the the negs are so big that you can just crop photos out of the contact prints to get an idea of detail.  The photo below is simply a crop of the image above, which was only scanned at 300 DPI…

Although these are only really test images, I will probably end up printing them at some point.  I’ve been printing on 10×8″ and 16×12″ Fuji lustre paper.  The photos are shot on Fuji Pro 400H, which has similar colour and contrast properties to the Fuji Pro 160S 5×4″ large format film I’m using, and gives beautifully subtle, understated prints.

When they’re cropped to these ratios, the images look like this:

As you can see, scanned on perhaps the world’s dirtiest scanner at uni.  I think I prefer the ‘instagram‘ type crops above, with the film information printed on the side, but you can’t scan these with the film inserts in the scanners at uni.

Some large format scans will follow.