Today I shot and developed my first large format photo. It's not a terribly interesting image — just a shot of the backyard — but I was pretty sure the film was ruined, so I didn't want to put too much effort into it. Surprisingly, it's actually quite decent.

First of all, the film expired five years ago, so I wasn't sure how effective it'd be anymore. Also, I accidentally opened the box of film in daylight. I wasn't sure how boxes of film worked, but I assumed the film would be sealed inside a lightproof bag inside the box. In fact it does come in a bag, but mine had been opened. Actually, I've read that the bag isn't guaranteed to be lightproof anyway; it's meant only to protect the film from gasses. The box provides the primary means of light protection, so it was foolish of me to open it in daylight. You can see the slight fogging on the left edge of the film.

Since I figured it might be ruined anyway, I didn't go out of my way to load the film in complete darkness, since that would involve waiting until after sundown (the door to my bathroom is nowhere near light-tight). I closed the door and put a towel down to cover the big hole at the bottom of the door, but just ignored the cracks of light around the other edges.

Also, since I don't have a plate to mount this camera to my good tripod, I could only use the old crappy one meant for holding small point-and-shoot cameras. It was amusing seeing a five-pound camera jiggling at the top of a flimsy little tripod. And with no cable release, I had to trigger the shutter by pushing the lever on the lens with my hand, which, combined with the tripod's instability, seemed certain to blur the photo.

Finally, I hadn't yet managed to develop a roll of film effectively — my last attempt turned out very underdeveloped, and that was in a lightproof tank. Sheet film has to be developed in trays, so the room has to be kept pitch black throughout the entire development process. So I figured even if the image somehow managed to make it past the expired, fogged film and blurry exposure, it was likely to become fogged during its open-air development.

Anyway, as I said, it turned out surprisingly well. The negative contains a good range of values that scans easily. I developed in a 1+3 dilution of Microdol-X at room temperature (80°F) for 7:30.

Once it was dry, I scanned it at 2400 dpi. My scanner can go as high as 4800 x 9600 dpi optical, but this image isn't fine art and there was no need to go that high. Even at 2400 dpi, the image is 10828 x 8420 pixels (about 91 megapixels) and is 178 MB on disk in 16-bit grayscale. It has to be viewed at 6.25% zoom in order to fit it all on screen.

I'm impressed by how much detail there is, even in this simple experiment. I'm sure there'd be much more detail if I had shot it from a steady tripod — it doesn't matter how much resolution you have if the camera is jiggling around when you take the picture. And even once I'm able to use my good tripod, I may have trouble getting really sharp images, because I understand this lens is known for being somewhat softer than most large format lenses. Still, the optical demands of large format equipment are actually lower than that of smaller formats, because the negative doesn't need to be enlarged as much. Therefore a 35mm lens needs to be able to resolve much finer details than a large format lens does.

So now I know I can produce a 4x5 negative and develop it properly. It's time to stop geeking around with the equipment and start using it to make pleasing images.