I have two young children at home and a full-time job that pays the bills, plus a YouTube channel that does not. The maths on finding time to shoot film is brutal. By the time the kids are in bed and the work day is wrapped, daylight is long gone and the camera options narrow to whatever can be made to work in the dark.
This is the writeup of the night I went out and tested whether 4x5 night photography was something I could actually do. The plan was a freezing February evening at St Arilda’s Church in Oldbury-on-Severn, the Toyo 45C monorail with a 90mm Nikkor SW on a recessed board, four sheets of FP4 Plus, an Ilford reciprocity failure compensation table in my pocket and really bad weather. I ended up shooting two sheets of Kodak Portra 160 as well, because I came across a kebab van on the way home and the colours were too good to ignore.
The verdict on whether large format night photography is a viable evening hobby is: yes, but with caveats. The reciprocity failure maths is the big one.
Why night photography on 4x5 at all
You might reasonably ask why I am doing this on the most awkward format possible rather than picking up a Bronica or a 35mm rangefinder and getting on with it. Two answers.
The first is that I have the kit. I have been shooting 4x5 for about a year by this point (the Toyo 45C arrived in summer 2020 and the Intrepid 4x5 Mk IV would arrive a couple of months after this video) and I want to push what I can do with it. Night photography felt like the right kind of stretch.
The second is that 4x5 actually suits long exposures. The film is enormous (a single 4x5 sheet has roughly fifteen times the surface area of a 35mm frame) and the resolving power is correspondingly higher. When you are exposing for tens of seconds or minutes, any softness in the image is going to come from camera shake, focus drift or subject movement rather than from grain or resolution. Large format gives you the headroom to make a clean long-exposure frame in a way that 35mm cannot match.
The catch is everything else. You are setting up a heavy camera on a tripod in the dark. You are metering a scene you can barely see. You are calculating reciprocity-failure-corrected exposures that may run into minutes. You are loading and unloading single sheets of film one at a time from holders that have to be kept clean. None of this is fast. All of it is pretty fiddly.
What reciprocity failure actually is
A quick technical aside because this whole video is built around it.
Black and white film does not respond to light in a perfectly linear way. The basic principle of exposure is that the total amount of light hitting the film equals shutter time multiplied by aperture-determined intensity. In daylight conditions this works as you would expect. Halve the aperture, double the shutter time, you get the same exposure. Double the aperture, halve the shutter time, also the same exposure. This is called the reciprocity law.
The reciprocity law breaks down at very short exposures (under about 1/10,000 of a second, which is irrelevant for film photography) and at very long exposures (over about a second, which is relevant for night photography). The technical reason for the long-exposure breakdown is that forming a stable latent image on a silver halide grain requires two or more photons to be absorbed within a short time window. The “latent image lifetime” of the first photon’s effect is in the millisecond range. When light is intense, photons arrive fast enough that the second one almost always lands within that window and the grain is sensitised. When light is dim, the average time between photons hitting a single grain gets longer than the latent image lifetime, so the first photon’s effect dissipates before the second arrives. The grain never accumulates enough energy to become developable.
The practical consequence is that long exposures need more time than the meter says. An exposure that the meter reads as 8 seconds at f/5.6 might actually need 13 seconds to give the same density on the negative. An exposure that the meter reads as 30 seconds might need 60 seconds or longer. The required correction grows non-linearly as exposures get longer.
Ilford publishes a compensation formula for their films. For FP4 Plus, the corrected time Tc is the metered time Tm raised to the power 1.26: Tc = Tm^1.26. A 10-second metered exposure becomes about 18 seconds. A 30-second metered exposure becomes about 65 seconds. A 60-second metered exposure becomes about 150 seconds.
Different sources give different formulas. Older Ilford datasheets used a more aggressive correction (closer to Tm^1.48) which produces meaningfully longer exposures. The Howard Bond data (from his article in Photo Techniques magazine some years back) gives slightly shorter corrections than the new Ilford formula. The Kodak generic graph for B&W gives something in between. There is no single right answer. What you use depends on what density you want at which zone and what developer you are using, plus how much patience you have for standing in the cold.
My pocket card on the night was based on the older Ilford datasheet, which is why my numbers came out longer than they probably needed to be. Worth knowing if you are reading this and planning your own night shoot. The newer Ilford formula gives shorter exposures and might be the more honest starting point.
The asymptotic limit question
In the description I asked whether reciprocity failure eventually becomes infinite. Is there a point at which no amount of exposure will produce any further density?
Practically, yes. Mathematically, no.
The mathematical answer is that the formulas are exponential functions, not asymptotic ones. Tm^1.26 keeps growing without limit as Tm grows. There is no vertical wall in the formula.
The practical answer is that at exposures beyond about 4 to 5 hours, the curve has become so steep that the increments are essentially useless. You are adding tens of minutes of exposure to gain trace amounts of density. The film will also be accumulating dark noise (thermal radiation contributes a small amount of fog over time even with no light hitting the film at all) which starts to compete with the actual image you are trying to make. The signal-to-noise ratio collapses.
For most practical night scenes, you will run out of patience, battery (if you are using a shutter that needs one), or sky-darkness before you run out of film response. The asymptotic limit is real but it is well beyond what any normal photographer is going to encounter.
The kit
The camera was my Toyo 45C, the monorail studio 4x5 I bought in summer 2020 to start my large format adventure. The 45C is a solid metal monorail, heavy enough to ignore wind (which mattered on the night), with full movements front and back and a Graflok back accepting standard 4x5 film holders.
The lens was a Nikkor SW 90mm f/4.5 mounted on a recessed lens board. The “SW” stands for Super Wide. A 90mm focal length on 4x5 is the equivalent of about 28mm on a 35mm camera, which is a wide angle. Lenses this wide for 4x5 sit so close to the film plane that mounting them on a flat lens board would not give the bellows enough room to compress, so you mount them on a recessed board (which physically pushes the lens body backwards into the camera) to give yourself the necessary working distance.
The 90mm f/4.5 is a useful lens for night work because the relatively bright f/4.5 maximum aperture lets you focus and compose on the ground glass in low light. Many large format wide lenses are f/5.6 or f/6.8 which makes ground-glass composition difficult after dark. The f/4.5 helps. Not by a lot, but by enough.
Four sheets of Ilford FP4 Plus loaded in two holders. Plus a Sekonic incident meter, my reciprocity table, a head torch, gloves, a thick coat and the patience to stand in a graveyard at ten o’clock at night while a camera I could barely see exposed film for fifty seconds at a stretch.
The shoot
I drove out to St Arilda’s after the kids were in bed. The church sits on a hilltop above Oldbury village and has been the subject of one of my favourite daytime shoots in colour on the Canon AE-1 Program a couple of months earlier. At night it takes on a different character. The church itself was floodlit, which gave me something to expose against, but the graveyard around it was deep dark with only spill from the building reaching the nearer headstones.
Frame 1 was the graveyard with the backlit silhouettes of headstones. I metered at f/5.6 and got 10 seconds. With FP4 Plus reciprocity correction that becomes about 18 seconds. I set the lens to B (bulb), held the cable release down, counted to 18, released. The first thing you notice about a long-exposure 4x5 shoot is how long 18 seconds actually is when you are standing in a graveyard in February in the dark. It is such a long time.
Frame 2 was the same scene at a smaller aperture for more depth of field. I metered f/32 and got 50 seconds. With the reciprocity correction that became about 20 minutes (using my old datasheet). I was going to give up on it but actually I made a different mistake (which I will get to in a moment) so this frame did not happen. My pocket card did not extend past 35 seconds metered, which on the old table converts to about 3 minutes exposed. 50 seconds was off the chart entirely.
Frame 3 I changed scene to point the camera straight up at the church itself. The floodlighting was bright enough to give me a 20-second metered reading at f/4.5, which corrects to 45 seconds. I held the shutter open for 45 seconds and tried not to think about how cold I was. The frame turned out to be the favourite of the night. The church looms over us. The motion blur from the wind in the few visible trees gives the frame a slightly haunted feel. The exposure was clean.
Frame 4 was a streetlamp scene on the way back to the car. A simple shot of a streetlamp with a signpost leaning towards it and a strip of road, all under a single sodium-vapour light. The angles caught my eye and the light source was bright enough that the exposure was something like 10 seconds metered (so about 18 seconds exposed). The frame works as a kind of urban-edge-of-darkness composition. I am pleased with it.
The kebab van was the surprise. Driving back through Oldbury I saw a classic kebab van parked up at the side of the road with its lights all on, the colours absurdly vivid against the night. I pulled over, unloaded the FP4 holders, loaded two sheets of Kodak Portra 160 I had brought along just in case and shot two frames. One portrait, one landscape. The portrait orientation is the better of the two.
What worked and what did not
The reciprocity table worked. The FP4 exposures all came back with usable density. The church frame in particular was exposed exactly where I wanted it (mid-tones in the floodlit areas, deep shadow in the surroundings, with the highlights on the walls not blown out). The streetlamp frame and the graveyard frame are both slightly hot in the highlights, which I am attributing to a combination of my old datasheet being conservative and my metering being slightly optimistic. Either way, they are recoverable in printing or scanning.
The Portra 160 was the wrong film for night work. Portra 160 is famously a low-saturation, low-contrast colour negative film. It is the right film for muted natural light and skin tones in soft light, or for landscapes with delicate colour palettes. It is not the right film for a kebab van under sodium and neon. The frames came back with the dynamic range I wanted but the colours were underwhelming. A more saturated film (Portra 800, Cinestill 800T, or even Ektar 100 if you can deal with the slower speed) would have been the better choice. Lesson learned for next time.
Long exposures eat your evening. The 45-second exposure on the church frame did not feel like 45 seconds at the time. It felt like five minutes. Standing in a graveyard in the dark in winter with nothing to do but watch a shutter cable release counts as a meditative activity, but you are not exactly making frames at speed. I shot four sheets of FP4 plus two of Portra in about an hour and a half of actual work, with maybe ten minutes of actual exposure time accounted for in the schedule. The rest was setup, metering, holder swaps and walking.
The Nikkor SW 90mm was the right lens choice. Wide enough to take in the church and its surroundings without backing up into the wet hedge behind me. Bright enough at f/4.5 to focus on the ground glass at night. Compact enough on the recessed board to keep the camera package reasonable in size. I would shoot night 4x5 with this lens again without hesitation.
The negative-image discovery
A small thing at the end of the video that has stuck with me.
When I got home and laid the developed church negative on my desk under good light to inspect it, I noticed something strange. I prefer the negative version of the frame to the positive. The church looks ghostly in negative. The sky goes solid black where it was solid white. The illuminated walls go solid white where they were bright. The result has a quality I cannot quite name (atmospheric, otherworldly, slightly threatening) that the positive does not have.
The other observation was that the texture of my wooden desk showed through under the negative wherever the negative was thinnest (which on a night shot is almost everywhere outside the floodlit areas). I started thinking about whether you could deliberately combine a thin night negative with a heavily textured second negative to give the empty sky areas of a night frame some visual interest.
I do not know what this turns into yet. The thought is sitting in the brewing-on-it part of my brain. I might come back to it.
Conclusions
Night photography on 4x5 is viable for evening sessions if you can find an hour and a half between the kids going to sleep and your own collapse. You will need a reciprocity table for your chosen film, a bright wide lens to help with focusing on the ground glass, a cable release with a locking B setting, a patient attitude towards exposures measured in tens of seconds and warm clothing.
I am going to do more of this. The next time, I will use the newer Ilford formula rather than the older table, which should give me shorter and more comfortable exposures. I will also pick a more saturated film stock if I am shooting colour, and plan the route in advance so I am not standing in graveyards for longer than I need to be.
The next church I shot on 4x5 was St James’ at Llancaut on the Intrepid Mk IV, which was a different kind of expedition. Also in ruins. Also haunted. But in daylight, which is, in retrospect, the easier option.
If you have done night photography on large format and you have a favourite film stock for it, I would genuinely like to know. The comments on the video are open.