I had a 100-year-old lens that I had not properly tested and a 4x5 monorail camera that wanted exercising. I had an actor friend who had agreed to put a suit on and meet me in a forest at the weekend. The setup was too good to waste on a straightforward portrait session.
This is the writeup of the morning I took the Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 135mm f/4.5 out for its first real shoot, mounted on my Toyo 45C, with the wonderful Ashley Robson (actor, Shaw Forest Park resident, genuinely patient model) playing a man on the run from someone or something for the camera. The frames came back beautifully apart from one technical problem with the negatives that I will get to. The bigger thing this shoot taught me is what kind of photographer I want to be. More on that further down.
The lens, briefly
The lens is a Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 135mm f/4.5. The Tessar design was patented by Paul Rudolph at Zeiss in 1902 and remains one of the most successful lens formulas ever produced. Four elements in three groups, very sharp in the centre, with a kind of three-dimensional rendering that modern lenses do not quite replicate. Mine dates from somewhere around the 1920s based on the serial number and the markings. It came in a brass barrel with no shutter at all (the shutter would have been a separate device mounted in front of the lens at the time it was made).
I had done some preliminary testing with the lens (covered in an earlier video on the channel where I worked out how to mount it on the Toyo, and how to expose with it given that there is no working shutter). The lens itself works. The image quality is excellent. The colour rendering (when it gets to colour) is warm and gentle. The black-and-white tonality is what you would expect from a competent old lens: tonally smooth without modern micro-contrast.
The catches are that the focus shifts slightly as you stop down (because the lens predates modern correction for spherical aberration), and that there is no shutter so you have to expose by uncovering and recovering the front element by hand (a lens cap is the traditional shutter for a lens this old). On 4x5 with slow film and small apertures, your exposures are typically in the half-second to one-second range, which is short enough for the timing to be sketchy and long enough that the timing matters. I have a working method for this now (I have explained it in earlier videos) but it is fiddly.
On 4x5, 135mm is roughly normal-to-slightly-wide. The 35mm equivalent is about 40mm. So a versatile focal length for this kind of work.
Shaw Forest Park and the man on the run
Ash is based in Swindon, where Shaw Forest Park is a small wooded local-authority park on the edge of the West Swindon estates, accessible, atmospheric in autumn. He had recommended the location when we had been planning a shoot for his actor portfolio a few weeks earlier (I had done some headshots for him on a different camera) and I thought it would suit the narrative idea I had in mind.
The narrative idea was loose. “Man on the run.” That was the whole of it. Ash arrived in a suit and tie (which he had decided himself, on the assumption that anyone running through a forest is more interesting if they look like they have come from somewhere unexpected) and we started shooting.
The first frame was Ash squatting low against a tree, hand on the ground, looking off to one side as if he had just stopped to catch his breath. The second was the same setup but from a lower angle, shot looking up at him through the foliage. The third was a low-angle frame with him standing and looking back the way he had come. The fourth had him half-emerging from behind a tree with his top button undone and his tie loosened, looking angry into the middle distance.
Each frame had a small amount of story embedded in it. Some sense that he had come from somewhere and was going somewhere else, with a reason behind the running. None of it was scripted. We worked it out as we went.
I used a single LED panel to fill Ash’s face from the side opposite the natural light source. Foma 100 is slow at ISO 100, and shooting under tree cover with a slow lens (the Tessar at f/4.5 is not bright) was already going to put me at exposures around a tenth of a second. With the fill light I could get the contrast where I wanted it without going slower. The shutter speeds across the shoot ranged from a tenth at f/4.5 to about a half-second at f/8 for the most shaded frames.
Ash held position for each of those exposures without moving. Try staying perfectly still for a tenth of a second with your hand on the ground in the cold while someone uncaps an antique lens and counts to a tenth. Really difficult. Ash made it look easy. That is what an actor brings to a shoot that a regular model does not always bring.
On the matter of doing a narrative shoot at all
I had a few comments on the video when it went up asking what I thought I was doing. Some viewers did not understand the narrative approach. Some did not understand the thriller-movie music in the edit. Some asked what the point was. Fair questions, all of them. Here is the honest answer.
I do not enjoy photographing “stuff” for its own sake. When I press the shutter, I want there to be a reason. I want the frame to be doing something more than recording that a thing existed in front of the camera. This is my main difficulty with landscape photography, which I have written about and talked about before. Every time I am pointing a camera at a tree or a hill or a sunset, the question my brain keeps asking is why. What is this picture doing? What story is it telling? Why should anyone (including me) want to look at it?
I often do not have an answer. The tree is there. The light is nice. The composition is fine. None of that, for me, justifies the shutter press. There are brilliant landscape photographers (Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, the late Fay Godwin) who can answer the why question with the frame itself. The frame contains its own argument. I am not yet one of those photographers and I am not sure I want to be. The discipline is different from what I am drawn to.
What I am drawn to is photographs that have a person and a story in them. Not always a literal story (the man on the run was a literal example) but at least a sense that the frame is part of something larger than itself. The person in the frame has come from somewhere and is going somewhere, and the frame is one moment in a longer thread. That is what makes the picture worth taking, for me.
When you have an actor available, you can be explicit about this. We invented a thriller plot in twenty seconds standing in a forest and shot frames that fit inside it. None of it is real. All of it is contrived. The point is not the realness, the point is that there is something for the viewer to think about beyond the visual surface.
The thriller music in the video edit was part of the same idea. I wanted the video to function as a kind of trailer for the photo essay (the eight or ten frames that came out of the shoot, viewed as a sequence rather than individually). Trailers have music. Music sets a tone. The tone I wanted was “moody noir thriller”, so that is the music I picked. Plenty of YouTube photography videos are scored with relaxing acoustic guitar over the photographer pointing at landscapes. That is fine for the photographer’s purposes but it is not the tone I was going for here.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion about all of this. The comments under the video are open and I have responded to most of them. What I will say is that I stand by the approach. I like the method. I like the results. I am going to keep doing this kind of shoot.
If you want to watch someone walk through a forest photographing leaves, there are excellent YouTube channels doing that. This is not one of them.
The purple dots problem
Here is the bit I am genuinely worried about.
When I got home and developed the four sheets of Foma 100 in my normal way (Ilfotec DD-X stock developer, water stop, Ilford Rapid Fixer), the negatives looked nice at first glance. The compositions worked. The exposures were where I wanted them. The lens had done its job.
When I scanned the negatives at high resolution to inspect them, I noticed something I had not seen on the light box. Tiny purple dots all over the surface of the film. Hundreds of them per square inch. Invisible to the naked eye at normal viewing distance but obvious at 100% magnification. On the positive (after inverting the scan), the dots appear as small white specks scattered across every frame.
At the resolution you would view these images on YouTube, they are essentially invisible. At print-sized resolution from a 4x5 negative, they would be a visible problem.
The cause is not immediately clear. The internet has a few different theories about what causes this kind of artefact on B&W film:
The most common diagnosis is silver particles in suspension in the fixer. As fixer is used, it dissolves silver halides from the unexposed film, and that silver accumulates in the fixer solution. If you reuse fixer for too long or if it has been stored for months, the silver can begin to fall out of suspension and form tiny solid particles. Those particles can deposit on the film during fixing and show up as pin-prick artefacts on the negative. The fix is fresh fixer.
A second possible cause is bacterial or fungal contamination of the working solution, which can produce similar artefacts. Less likely with a mixed fresh fixer but possible if the working solution has been sitting around.
A third possibility is a film stock issue. Foma is known to have some emulsion-quality variability batch to batch, and a bad batch could produce surface artefacts. This is the least likely explanation but it cannot be ruled out without testing fresh Foma in fresh chemistry.
My current fixer has been in use for four or five months. I have been testing it periodically with a clearing-time test on spare film to confirm it is still fixing properly, but the clearing-time test does not tell you whether silver has fallen out of suspension. The fixer could be working but producing artefacts on every roll.
The diagnostic test is to mix fresh fixer and develop a fresh roll of Foma 100. If the purple dots disappear, the fixer was the problem. If they persist, I need to look at the Foma batch or the working solution chemistry. I will be running that test and reporting back on the channel in a follow-up video.
You can also reportedly filter old fixer through a coffee filter to remove silver particles in suspension, although I would rather just mix fresh chemistry than try to rescue old.
What I have learned
A few things from this shoot.
The 100-year-old Tessar is excellent. Now that I have a working method for exposing without a shutter, and a feel for how much focus shift to expect when I stop down, this lens is going to be a regular part of my 4x5 work. The image quality and rendering character justify the faff.
Narrative shoots are so much more fun than straight shoots. Inventing a context for the frames you are about to take changes how you compose them. Ash standing in a forest is a portrait. Ash on the run from someone in a forest is a moment in a story. The second produces frames that are more interesting to make and more interesting to look at. I will be doing more of this.
My fixer needs replacing. I have been complacent about chemistry hygiene. The purple-dots problem is the wake-up call. From now on, fresh fixer every two months at most, and a good visual inspection of the solution before each developing session.
Camera movements are next. This shoot was strictly straight-on with no tilts, swings or rises. The next outing for the 4x5 (covered in a later video) is the first real test of using camera movements for architecture. After that I would like to start using more movements in portraits, particularly focus-plane manipulation with Scheimpflug for environmental portraiture.
Big thanks to Ash for putting on a suit and standing still for a tenth of a second at a time in a cold autumn forest while I uncapped and recapped a hundred-year-old lens. Ash bookings are at starnow.co.uk/ashleyrobson5. If you are casting in the south of England and you need someone who can take direction and hold a pose under absurd conditions, he is your man.
A good day at work.