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.

Tags:   Owen DR5 driving sleeping sepia Ilford HP5 car trips asleep Contax AX 35mm things to do with your black and white film portrait children Zeb Andrews Zeb Andrews photography Blue Moon Camera

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