Still Life

Another post, another prime minister! As most of my cameras stay with me longer than and month and a half, I thought I’d dig out my Nikon FM2n. Those of you with good memories will remember that I said of my F3 that it was the first Nikon I ever purchased. That’s true, my FM2n was given to me, quite a while ago, by a journalist I knew well, years back. It has sentimental value to me, so I had it CLA’d a while back, and it works well although it still looks a bit battered.

This time I put on the 55mm Nikkor Micro (Macro), loaded in a roll of Ilford Delta 100, and set up in the corner of the room. I used a white backdrop for the first few (a white shirt) then I swapped to a black backdrop (black polo shirt) for the remainder.

The film was developed in Ilford DDX developer, 1+4 at 20°, rather than giving it the recommended 10.5 mins, I gave 11, not that it seemed to make much difference! I like the images with the black back better, so those are the ones I’m posting. The lesson I’ve learned from this exercise is that for still life, I need smaller apertures, these were made at f11 for 1 second, on a tripod of course, and that’s not enough for such subjects. Next time I’ll go F16 or even f22.