Cowboy and horse 4×5

An actual real cowboy, that is, part of a dying breed.  I’m not a real cowboy, I just play one on TV.

He was patriarch of a family of horsewomen that run a stables up in the mountains; when we do horseback riding tours we take them up to his family’s stables.  Sadly he died this Summer and I hardly knew him or got to speak with him.

This is the outtake, the horse was less cooperative than the human.  The more I look at these the more I think that I should print them in a landscape orientation and cut off the top/bottom, they’ll be better framed that way.  I would have done it in camera but I wanted to shoot fast and let the guy get on with his day.

I went back and reviewed my work over the last few years and found several posts with pictures shot up at the stables.  Here they are:
Dutch
Colorado Elk
Project Pt.II, Adv.Photo Redux
Horses
Jeep Tours 2017 Super 8 Edition, Pt.I
Eve’s Cantina

Eve’s Cantina 4×5

Up at the stables again.  The Cantina opened up this year and has come in handy when my passengers need a last-minute shot of Dutch Courage to handle 1000-foot drop-offs and windy dirt roads.

She had to stand really still for this exposure, I think I timed it at 15 seconds or somewhere around there.

Curly Bill 4×5

He’s not the Sheriff so don’t be fooled by his badge: it reads “Official Brothel Inspector.”

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Uncle Marmot 4×5

Marmot with the GOG Trolley.  I think I was getting a bit of flare here.  There was some very expired Ilford paper lying around the darkroom and I printed using that to see if I could get it to resemble a very old photograph.

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I can’t remember which of these I printed so here are both, I always try to bracket.

4×5 portrait session 0

My first shot shooting and developing 4×5 film was disastrous in just about every way.  But there was one reasonable success:

My classmate Caleb

Everything else looks pretty terrible and I’m embarrassed to show it to you, but that’s never stopped me yet.  So here’s an example of what most of the shots looked like.

Peak construction going strong with the Cog Railway torn up

I anticipated that the other 3 students would go the route of the cheapest film they could buy and they didn’t disappoint me, it was Arista and Fomapan until te very end.  Looking around, I saw that 50-sheet boxes of Bergger Pancro 400 were nearly as affordable, I wanted to try something different, and I knew that our photo instructor Stacy is a big fan of Bergger paper.  I’m sure this film is great once you know how to work with it and from my research a lot of people were recommending to shoot it at ASA200, that coupled with the outdated times for BRF200 being the only information to build off, helped with some funky results, but also I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Yankee Agitank and shooting large format on top of Pike’s Peak has plagued me with problems every time I’ve gone up.

Steampunk Birthday 4×5

As a continuation of this post, here are the 4×5 shots I took down in the basement of Bristol Brewery.  As far as where I put everyone I was mainly looking at where the light was falling and trying to get the brightest spot.  Now that I’ve had more experience I would have gone for that amazing background and just use a longer exposure.  Live and learn I guess.

If one looks at the group shot, the bottom of the picture has some funky thing going on from the developing.  I’m not sure why the other sheets of film escaped and this one had problems, but we always had some sort of problem with the big developing tanks (that hold 12 sheets).  At the end of the year we bought a Stearman Press tank that holds 4 sheets, which is good because I don’t need to wait until I’ve shot 10 sheets and then develop them all at once.