There is something about night photography that I like. Especially the kind with deep shadows and clear highlights making great and lovely contrasty look. I have seen people achieve this look by pushing Ilford HP5 plus three stops to 3200, and I decided to have a go at it myself. This is not the first time I have made an attempt at this, but it is the first time I have tried to push the film in this already very contrasty environment. You can say I got contrast in buckets, but maybe not in the way that I had first imagined. I think it might be down to a combination of me not quite knowing how to meter a shot at night time, and I was trying my way around using a spot meter and the zone system, and the fact that I was relying on development advice from some threads I found online, and I should probably have given it a bit more development time for a 3 stop push like this.

As I said above the image, I made some attempts at metering the scene and it turned out I am not good at that in the dark. I metered like I would have done at daytime, and I think I slightly under-exposed most of the images. The images that seem to have worked the best, were the ones where I metered at a very bright spot in the image and gave it four extra stops of exposure to bring it into zone 9. When developing the roll, I went online to find development times for the developers I have in my arsenal. They aren’t that many these days, I have Rodinal, FX39 II, 510 Pyro and HC110. Of these ones, I was between the two gloopy ones, HC110 and 510 Pyro. I chose to go with the Pyro developer to give the negatives some stain in case of over exposure. We can say that that was a completely unnecessary thought.

When looking for development times for this combination, HP5+ at 3200 in 510 Pyro, I found very little online. I found one source saying 26 minutes at 1+100, and another saying 28 minutes at 1+100 in a rotary processor like I have. I went to err on the safe side going for 26 minutes, but after seeing how thin my negatives ended up, I think I would add at least five minutes to that development time should I ever try this again. That said though, I think I got a few quite cool images anyway.

Another interesting thing with this roll. SOME frames were insanely dusty. The kind of dust that is stuck to the emulsion, while other frames weren’t. I dried this film together with two rolls of Kodak Ektar 100 and none of those films showed any kind of dust like this. I am a bit uncertain how this could have come about, but the film clearly had a lot of dust to the emulsion when drying. I left it in for fun to show the defects.

I am very happy that at least some of my frames turned out in a presentable manner. I might try this again and I might not. But in my next attempt, I am probably not going to push three stops, rather rely on longer shutter speeds.

Thank you for reading.

In my last entry, I went out to shoot at an old ferry dock in Kapp, Østre Toten in Norway. I shot the images with a roll of ProImage 100 in the Olympus Trip junior and a roll of expired Konica Centuria 100 in my Nikon F80, Now, what was supposed to be my main camera for that day, the F80 with the expired Konica, didn’t turn out at all as the film was most likely stored in a damp shed in the sunniest parts of Spain since it was produced and looked like a wet in wet aquarelle. Not that I really mind that, it will be a cool artistic effect in some coming outings, however, I did not expect the film to be that bad only being 20 years out of date. I have shot far older films with better results here on this blog before.

When looking through the images from that outing, I realized that this was really a location for black and white film, and I wanted to shoot this location on 120 film with some contrast and grain. Nothing too crazy like StreetPan, but mildly contrasty like Tri-X pushed one step past 800. So I went back a day later with the Hasselblad and a roll of Tri-X 400. A film that I haven’t used that much lately for different reasons, firstly because it in my area is a lot more expensive than Ilford HP5+ which is one of my favorite filmsmin 120 format. That said though, in this outing, I opted for Tri-X, because I love how this film looks in 510 Pyro. I have used this combination before in 35mm, and I figured it would probably look even better in Medium Format.

On this day, the weather was sunny and the sun made this location look very different. The textures in the worn wood became a super powerful eye-grab in the image and I think the choice of black and white was correct to really bring this feel out. I chose to use a polarizing filter to shave off any glare from the water around the dock or from any damp boards that could confuse the look. As always with 510 Pyro, my negatives were impeccable in quality, giving me loads of dynamics to play with when editing the scans. I am planning to make a darkroom print of one of these frames at some point to see how that will turn out.

As I briefly mentioned in my previous entry, the ferry between Hamar and Kapp was a great idea that became a nightmare for the people involved with it. The idea of binding Kapp and Toten together with Hamar via a ferry meant that Hamar would now become a market not only for doing business in terms of trading, but it also made the teacher college closer for students wanting to become teachers, it meant more jobs were available, and also that you had a direct line to the Railway between Oslo and Trondheim. Crossing the lake took about 45 minutes and the ferry was top modern, although, not made for the conditions in which it was now set to operate. It is also mentioned to be the noisiest ferry you could imagine with an engine rattle that was jokingly referred to as the earth quake.

The ferry was a private initiative, and it was a popular ferry. Once it was launched back in 1951, its launch was of massive importance for Hamar as a town as well as for the small comunities in Toten. The official lake ferry, Mjøsfergen, went from Gjøvik to Mengshoel, not to Hamar, which must have been a bit hard to swallow in Hamar as the rivalry between the two cities were somewhat prominent at this time.

Within its short operation period, the ferry was both popular and ridiculed. The fact that someone bought a ferry that could not be docked at any end of its planned route, and that they had to make new docks for it on both sides, was a bit interesting. For that reason, the dock that I am currently photographing, is not just a memorial of the ferry, but also reminder of how much money that was invested in this project.

After a while, a third dock was added to the route between Kapp and Hamar. A short stop-over at Tingnes, about 70% of the way from Kapp, not meant this ferry was the link between Hamar and two important agricultural hubs, giving easy access to the railways. The joy didn’t last, the Hamar-Kapp ferry managed, within its short term in operation to sink at all its three docks. Once at winter storage in Kapp. At the end, the patience and money were at an end, and with the motion of building a bridge across the lake, the fairytale ended in the late 70s. The ferry was sold to a barge-company and rigged down to becoming a barge boat. Fittingly, the barge boat was used during the building of the bridge. Also, the barge sank (yes it did!) and was raised and scrapped in 1988.

The ferry Port in Kapp is currently the only real place that reminds us about this ferry’s existence. The other remains are either in museums or in other ways hidden in archives. There might also be some things remaining at Tingnes, but I am not sure if this is authentic or not. The docks in Hamar were dismantled years ago to facilitate for a more accessible water front. I will keep my eyes open for more about this story, but for now, the docks at Kapp are the only real place I could find.

Thank you for bearing with me through this long lesson about local transportation history in the Norwegian countryside. I hope you found it enjoyable to read about, and see some images from the locations.

There is this idea that we always feel like everybody else are better than us. That they take more interesting images than us, and have access to more interesting locations than us. In the past years, I have often chosen not to take photos because I find nothing interesting around at all. I sometimes feel like wherever I go, I will just find lakes, fields and bushes. Not until a few days ago, have I realized how beautiful these fields actually are and how they can make for some interesting photographs. For this blog-post, I decided to go to two different faming towns in my local area to see what I could get out of these areas. I chose to bring out the Olympus Trip Junior and the Nikon F80 for this trip, and I decided to go for a grey and slightly rainy day for this shoot as I wanted to look for those muted tones the grain fields give you on these days. Sadly, I didn’t have Kodak Portra 160 at hand, but I chose to go with Kodak ProImage 100 for the Olympus Trip Junior an expired roll of Konica Centruia 100 that expired in 2002. I have never shot this film stock before, not even when it was within date, but I picked up a few rolls cheaply some weeks ago and decided to have a try. Midly stated, the results were interesting, and I think it might have severely contaminated my C41 chemistry.

When shooting a color film through the Trip Junior, the limitations of the lens become more prominent. Now, I like how the image above turned out after some editing, but the lens is far from sharp and has quite soft edges. It does also provide quite a sizable portion of vignetting. That said though, this kind of shot is probably not what the camera was made for anyway. I have different shots later in the post that show the lens more at its strength. However, an image taken with the expired Konica, has a very different array of issues.

To be honest, I did not expect the results to be this bad from the Konica film. I have successfully shot a lot of expired film over the years, but never had results this aquarellic. An interesting point though is that the color shifts along the roll aren’t consistent. Some frames are far better than others and some have a bigger variety of color casts. I shot the film at ISO 20 to allow for the twenty years of degradation it has suffered and at least I had images. I also had some imperfections in the ProImage scans, a film that was in date, and I wonder if it could be a contaminated developer as they were developed at the same time.

Anyway, I shot some fields and some shots of the church I parked next to and moved on to my next location. In this image you can see the vignetting and edge softness very clearly, but in this case I think it suits the image and composition quite well. My next location is also connected with farming and agriculture, but in a different way.

Another important part of the agriculture in this area is the transportation and processing of food, and for this part of my adventure I went to Kapp Melkefabrikk. An old factory area where they produced condensed Milk under the brand Viking Melk in older times. Today, the buildings are used by the local culture school and by other businesses needing space. Also, the buildings are absolutely gorgeous, and I have done some shooting here before, but today I had a different goal than before. But first I obviously made a shot of the factory buildings where I parked the car.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, between 1951 and the late 1970s, there used to be a ferry between Kapp and Hamar. Thinking about it, this makes perfect sense. It would cross Mjøsa at the widest point connecting Kapp, an important agricultural place with production of among other things, condensed milk, with the main Norwegian Railway at Hamar. It also had a stop-over at Nes, which is another agricultural hotspot in the area. The problem however, was that the ferry itself wasn’t up for the task. It couldn’t handle the shallow waters at any of the ports, and new ferry ports had to be created with heavy adaptions of the lake-beds. When the ferry finally was in traffic, it couldn’t handle the colder months making the season very short, making the economical aspect of the operation questionable. It also sank multiple times during winter storage and became a laughing stock among the public and a headache for the ones in charge.

Having known this story, and being fascinated by it for years, I still had not been down to the ferry port at Kapp before. That was my next goal. The ferry terminal les mainly untouched since the traffic ended, and I wanted to capture it with the expired film, obviously thinking the film would actually perform decently, but since it didn’t, I have some snaps with the Trip Junior to show and a definite need to go back and shoot it with a higher quality camera to really capture this place.

I am still working on finding the correct workflow for me with camera-scanning color-film and I tried different approaches with the ProImage as you can see from these results.

However, I like how this last one turned out after some tweaking:

So my takeaway from this day was basically – Stop looking for things that aren’t there, shoot what is around! That would be my photographical advice for today.

And… Don’t use expired Konica Centuria 100…

Yesterday, I went on a walk along the tracks at Valdresbanen. This railway was closed to traffic in 1989, but the tracks are still kept on a sizable portion of the line. The official closure of the tracks was as late as 2021. I have a fascination for railroads and for abandoned means of transportation from a historical perspective, and I am working on a project where I am doing Valdresbanen. This time, went for a walk from Eina to Holte, a walk of about 4 kilometers along these tracks. I was looking for leftovers from the its glory days. Things like tracks, signs, control boxes, whatever really. Along with me on the trip I brought the Olympus Trip Junior with a roll of Kentmere 100, and the Hasselblad 500C with a roll of Ilford Ortho Plus.

I realised after my last trip with the Olympus trip that it seems to underexpose the film a bit. For that reason I chose to push the Kentmere 100 two stops in development and it seems to have given me good negatives. As we were walking along the tracks from Eina, we came to the small peaceful lake called Skjellbreia. This is the main source of drinking water for the area and is kept very clean and is a quiet are without too many cabins. The tracks around Skjellbreia was also important in the operational days of the line because it was the main loading space for dangerous goods. I am not sure why it was placed there where there were no stations, but that might maybe be exactly why it was there.

After strolling for a few kilometers, I came across an interesting box that was locked. I could see some kind of connections and switches in there, but I have no idea what they might be for. The line was never electrified and there were no logical thing requiring controls such as traffic lights or a line switch on the line. The box, however, looked quite cool and I took an image of it with both the cameras.

When it comes to the film in the Hasselblad. I have struggled massively getting good results with Ilford Ortho plus. I love the grain it produces and I love what it looks like when other people use it, but in my results, it tends to become very much black and white with very limited shadow detail. This time I tried it with Adox FX39 II and I am moderately happy with the results. I do much prefer how the Kentmere 35mm film came out to what I got with the Ortho Plus this time. I find the initial results with the Ortho were very contrasty and almost black and white. I did some tweaking, but I am still not very happy with them.

I also walked passed a few signs along the tracks. These old signs are quite interesting to me and they inspire me to take images. I made a little happy mistake on one if them when I was trying out different compositions on a sign. I was trying to figure out how I could get the sun out of the frame when I accidentally pressed the button on the Olympus. I actually like the image that came out very much.

In all seriousness though, the signs around this portion of the line weren’t the most interesting. Most of them were either distance marking or speed markings, but I made a few shots anyway and there are a few I really like.

When developing these rolls, I had to do some guesswork. I wanted to used Adox FX39 II on this shoot because like the way it looks on slower films. Additionally, I wanted to know how it would work on a two-stop push with the Kentmere film. I found a time for the Kentmere 100 at box speed in FX39 II at 6 minutes 30 seconds at 20 degrees, but no time anywhere for the Ortho 80. My solution was to find times for FP4 plus and HP5 plus and see how they compared with other developers. I came to 8 minutes of development time with continuous agitation. This did give me very nice negatives that seemed correctly developed. However, there were no side markings on the film, So it couldn’t be judged that way. Anyway. If I am to use this film again, I would most likely stick with this development time.