Searching for Puffy White Clouds

One of the things that had bothered me with the first few rolls of film shot with the Petri was the distracting brightness of the sky and the lack of contrast between the sky and any clouds that might be rolling through.  I made the best of the situation after the fact in Lightroom with a few brush strokes, but you don’t want to rely on something that can be made difficult by elements infringing beyond the edge of the skyline.  An in camera solution is always best.

It seems obvious to mention, but one of the things worth remembering about black and white film is that it sees differently than we do, and differently than color film or a digital sensor.  It is effective at differentiating the lights from the darks but is colorblind in discerning the colors from each other.  Sometimes working in monochrome requires some additional filtering of specific tones of light or selection of film characteristics to get us the contrasts or exposures we want to see in our final product.

By the time I had prepped for a day shoot in Ft Wayne a few weeks ago, I had moved onto a new film as my staple.  I had tried the Ilford Delta 100 film as an alternative to FP4 (Plus X) and was hooked after the first roll.  This film produces a noticeably wider range of contrast in the negatives than does the FP4 (Plus X) I had started off with. 

My second change – a couple colored filters in a filter sleeve tucked into the back pocket of the Petri’s Ona bag.  When shooting monochrome, if you want to darken the skies, but not the clouds, you reach for a Yellow, Orange or Red filter.  Effect depends on the angle of the sun in the sky and your relation to it, but yellow darkens the sky to a natural shade of gray we might expect a pleasant blue sky to render in monochrome.  Orange darkens a sky further and red often leaves a surreal, otherworldly dark cast to the sky. 

A filter absorbs the colors other than its own shading based on proximity to its own color on the spectrum.  Blue light from the sky is sucked into a red filter, preventing much of it from ever reaching the film.  Since they are white, containing all colors of the spectrum, the bright areas of a white puffy cloud proceeds through the filter directly to the film and a noticeable contrast is recorded. 

Putting a filter on the lens changes the exposure.  Typically a yellow filter is a one stop filter.  A red is a two or two and half stop increase in exposure.  More to carefully think about when mentally stopping back to sunny 16.

I used the yellow filter on my day trip to FtWayne.  I shot a roll wandering around downtown and roll at a location of personal interest that will get its own post soon enough.  The results were natural and accomplished what I sought to.  There’s a lot of old downtown Ft Wayne that was leveled through the 60’s and 70’s, but two Iconic landmarks were spared the wrecking ball.  Those are the images that lead this post.  The Iconic Lincoln Financial tower, the tallest building in the state of Indiana until the late 60’s when Indianapolis loosened its regulations on building heights.  The other - the richly ornate Allen County courthouse.