After more than a year off, I took the Stenopeika Caronte 4x5 and a Taylor-Hobson Cooke Series III from around 1905 into a country churchyard and shot eighteen sheets of black and white paper reversal. Some worked. Some did not. Working with a lens this old taught me a few things on the day that I want to write down properly, both for my own reference and for anyone else thinking about pairing antique glass with paper reversal.
This is partly a shoot report and partly a note-to-self on getting back into a process I had been away from. If you have not seen the paper reversal stuff before, the four-day paper and developer test and the DIY portrait box camera build cover the groundwork and the planned destination, respectively. This sits in the middle.
The kit
Camera: Stenopeika Caronte 4x5, the field camera I have been using throughout the paper reversal project.
Lens: a Taylor-Hobson Cooke Series III from about 1905. A genuinely beautiful piece of brass and glass, and the kind of object that makes you understand why people who shoot antique lenses talk about them the way they do. It is also, with apologies to its designers, properly hazy after a century and a quarter of being a lens.
Meter: a Reveni Labs spot meter. I have sold the Sekonic L-858D I used during last year’s testing (it had appreciated to a price worth realising), so I am back to the smaller Reveni. It is fine for this kind of slow, considered shooting.
Paper: I still have sheets of Foma Speed N312 loaded from last year. From my previous testing this paper has an effective ISO of around 1.7 in this process with the Ansco 120 developer, so that is what I used for the exposure calculations. Once these sheets are gone I am going back to Kentmere VC. You absolutely do not need fancy paper for this process. The Kentmere is cheap, available, and behaves predictably.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Caronte 4x5 on a tripod with the brass Cooke lens mounted, in the churchyard]
Working around a hazy 120-year-old lens
The Cooke is the first lens I have shot extensively in this process that has serious haze. It is the kind of haze you get from a century of internal element bloom: a thin, milky fog inside the lens that you can see when you point the lens at a bright source. In normal use this gives images a soft, slightly-glowing character that some people pay a lot of money to replicate with modern lenses. In paper reversal, which has limited dynamic range to start with, the same haze can wash out highlights to the point of total whiteout.
What this meant on the day, practically: I was hiding from the sun more or less constantly. Direct sun on the lens gave me blurry white frames with no usable detail. Working in shadow, or shooting away from the sun, gave me workable contrast. Specular highlights on a stone or in foliage were fine, as long as the sun itself was not in or near the frame.
I did one deliberate experiment with the haze, which I want to mention because it was the kind of “let’s see” moment that this process invites. I framed a gravestone with the sun directly behind it, hoping the haze would give me a glowing halo around the stone. It did. It gave me such a glowing halo that the gravestone effectively disappeared into it. Lesson learned. No more pointing this lens at the sun.
![PLACEHOLDER: the failed sun-behind-gravestone shot, showing the lens haze blowing out the entire frame]
What I shot
Eighteen sheets across a morning. The scenes I worked through:
- A stone archway, which gave me my first sheet
- A view down a path between yew trees toward a row of gravestones in the distance, framed through foliage to control the sun
- A handful of portrait-orientation single-stone studies
- A church window in deep shade
- A wider landscape looking out over the surrounding fields
- The sun-behind-gravestone experiment described above
Half-second to two-second exposures, mostly at f16 to f22. The shutter, as usual with this lens, is my hand over the front element. Reveni meter to set the time, then count seconds in my head while uncovering and re-covering the lens.
It is a slow way to work, and it is genuinely lovely. The pace of the process, the physical weight of the camera, the way you have to think about each shot because each sheet costs you a few quid and a development session, all of it adds up to a different kind of attention than I get from any other camera I own.
The development setup
For anyone who has not seen the dark room before, it is also the garage, the studio, and the camera repair shop. The recently-built ULF portrait box camera now takes up most of the bench space that would normally fold out to give me room. So I work standing in the remaining floor space, with trays on whatever surface I can clear.
My process is develop-to-completion at every stage, not development by inspection. Full sequence:
- Developer to completion (Ansco 120, mixed from the recipe in Steve Anchell’s Darkroom Cookbook)
- Wash
- Bleach to completion (mixed from the recipe in Dave Walker’s Possibilitorium, which is the most thorough resource on this process anywhere)
- Wash
- Clarifier
- Wash
- Room lights on, re-expose the paper until an image just starts to appear
- Developer to completion again (this is where the positive image emerges in front of you)
- Stop
- Fix
- Wash
The stop and fix at the end are technically optional in paper reversal. I do them anyway because they are belt-and-braces and the paper is cheap enough that I am not going to skip steps to save twenty seconds.
I work two sheets at a time, which is the most I can manage with the re-exposure step. Once the room lights go on, anything else in any tray gets cooked. So you do two, then two more, then two more.
The results
A mix, as expected from a return after a year off.
The gravestone-through-foliage shot. My favourite of the day on technical merit. Good exposure, decent focus, reasonable contrast. The subject matter is admittedly not the most thrilling but everything that should be in the print is in the print, in the right tones, in the right place.
![PLACEHOLDER: the gravestone-through-foliage print, the favourite from the day]
The wide landscape over the fields. Too dark overall. The sky in the unreversed negative was nearly black, which gave me almost no usable density in the positive print’s brightest areas. Lacks a focal point too, which I should have caught at the time. A reminder that the process is unforgiving of unconsidered composition because you cannot crop and recover in post.
The sun-behind-gravestone experiment. A noble failure. Worth doing because now I know.
A few that came back overexposed slightly. I was rusty on the metering. The N312 at ISO 1.7 is a known quantity and I should have been more disciplined about the calculations rather than mentally rounding.
Several where lens flare from haze invaded the frame even though I was nowhere near pointing at the sun directly. That haze is going to define what I can do with this lens. I would not want to lose it entirely (the character is a big part of why I am shooting with it) but I am going to have to be more aggressive about controlling stray light. A proper lens shade, maybe a deeper one than the lens currently has, would help.
What I am taking forward
The big lesson is that working with antique glass in paper reversal is its own discipline within an already specific discipline. The lens is not just a lens. It is a participant in the image, with its own behaviour around bright light and contrast, and you have to plan compositions around what it will and will not tolerate.
The next move is taking this kit somewhere with actual people in it. The graveyard was a good first day back because the targets do not move and nothing is going wrong while you are trying to work out your exposure. The whole reason I built up the paper reversal capability is to photograph people. So the next outing with the Caronte and the Cooke is going to be a town centre somewhere, finding willing strangers, doing street portraits with a slow process. That is the plan.
Also coming, possibly, a new camera from Samuel at Stenopeika that sits between the Caronte 4x5 and the absolute monster of the ULF box. Bigger negatives, more portable than the box. I will see when, and if, it materialises.
For now, the kit is cleaned, the chemistry is in the bottles, and I am back at it. That, more than any of the specific images, was the win from the day.