Sunflower, Soft Focus.

[Maris]

Sunflower, Soft Focus
Gelatin-silver photograph on Ultrafine Silver Eagle VC FB photographic paper, image size 21.3cm X 16.4cm, from a 4x5 Tri-X Pan Professional negative exposed in a Tachihara 45GF double extension field view camera fitted with a 150mm f4 Wollaston Meniscus soft-focus lens and a #25 red filter.
GP-1 gold toner.

[Mick Fagan]

Interesting in a couple of ways.

Firstly the soft focus lens, I'm not familiar with it but presumably it's soft focus is inbuilt, not from a purpose built metal filter with holes in it.

There also looks like a missing anti halation coating on the film, which I know is not true. But on the right side, one can see flare seemingly happening, which is an interesting effect.

Then there is the colour; I've always been fascinated by something called gold toning in a photographic situation which turns the picture blueish, not yellowish, if you get my drift?

Did you get the dreaded purple fingers?

Apart from those observations, it is a pretty nice picture and roughly a 50% enlargement from the negative.

Working on the assumption that you have used the full negative, you must have been reasonably close to the subject; bellows factor?

Once again, another impressive picture Maris.

[Maris]

Thanks for your insights Mick.
The soft focus lens was a concavo-convex element robbed out of a failed zoom lens. It was attached to the back of a #1 shutter with Blu-Tac. The concave side faced forward hence it matched the Wollaston configuration.
Soft focus can come from both chromatic aberration and spherical aberration. I like spherical so the #25 red filter got rid of the chromatic.
Lighting was daylight with about 1 stop extra exposure for bellows extension.

I used a ploy much liked by pinhole-ists: to have the fine detail of the subject just within the resolving power of the optical system. The result is soft and sharpish and considered "good". Any blurrier and and the result is "mush" considered bad. Or so the theory goes.

No toner stains for me. Years ago in the spirit of chemical contact cowardice I learned "no-fail" tong skills. Of course millions of Chinese are way better than me just using chop sticks.