My son Owen asleep on a car trip back from the coast. I take a fair number of photos of the little guy (who is rapidly getting less and less little) as you might guess. I mean, I am after all never without my cameras. But this is the first I have posted of him, usually I let Wendi post my photos along with hers on her account. But I wanted to get this photo up because not only do I really like it, it has a fairly interesting story to go with it that should interest some people. This is Ilford HP5 shot at 800 and processed through DR5 in their warm tone developer.
DR5 is a cool little company in Colorado that takes a variety of black and white films, and I do mean a variety, and processes them as positive slides. They have two different developers to boot. One for neutral black and white slides and the other a warm tone developer. And they look gorgeous. This digital representation pales in comparison to how the actual slides look on a lightbox but it still shows a bit of that quality. The grain of the HP5 at 800 through this developer is just beautiful too. Anyway, I have known about DR5 for a number of years but have never actually sent them any film until I finally decided it was about time I tried them out. I am going to have to do this more often!
They also process Scala by the way for any of you photographers still running around with some. I actually have a single roll of 120 left in my fridge...
Owen is definitely an easier target while sleeping and I couldn't pass this shot up. Especially with him conked out on my fleece. The lighting was actually kind of tricky as we would drive through patches of shadow and bright light, I was shooting manually on the Contax AX (I just like to say that) I was testing that day and didn't trust the camera enough to switch it over to any automatic setting. And why would I need to in this case, I know perfectly well how to expose film. It is too easy to replace trust in one's abilities with trust in a machine's abilities. Of course I might have completely blown the exposure because of that trust (I do make mistakes afterall), but in this case I didn't.
