4 times Hamburg Cathedral on Good Friday

I could have chosen 4x5 on the Hamburg Cathedral as the title. More on that in a moment. First of all, a note: Hamburg Cathedral is closed on Good Friday. This is difficult to understand in a secular state like Germany, but perhaps it is also due to the founding of the Hamburg Cathedral. After all, the folk festival that takes place three times a year is called that because as early as the 11th century, traders could find shelter in the cathedral (which was demolished in 1804) in bad weather. In any case, on Good Friday I only met photographers and ignorant people at the cathedral - maybe one or the other was both 😉

I'm at the closed Good Friday Cathedral definitely happy. This time I set out with the Linhof Super Technica V, which I haven't had in my hand for far too long. You don't know what I'm talking about? OK, here's a photo of this handy camera.

The camera used

This handy monster is made for 4×5 sheet film. Inches, mind you, roughly 9 by 12 cm - so the negative is larger than the display of your smartphone. 4×5 is the smallest large format and just twice as large as the medium format at 6×9, that I've had so much fun withOr: the crop factor for 0,3mm is 150. The 45mm lens used therefore roughly corresponds to 150mm for 5.6mm and is the normal focal length. Since the aperture is also subject to the crop factor, the 45mm f/1.7 lens, converted to “full format”, corresponds to XNUMXmm f/XNUMX.

In any case, when photographing with large format, you see mistakes very quickly and you can make a lot of them. This starts with you having to put every single negative into a single slipcase. In the dark, of course. And how do you know which way around you have to insert the negative. At least there is a mark in the film sheet.

Development is then relatively easy for large format because Jobo has a development tank that is annoying to load, but at least makes development possible in daylight. With even larger negative formats, you then have to work in developing tanks - i.e. in absolute darkness.

Since I've had the film in the fridge for several years now, I only used the smallest possible number of negatives that I can get developed with the Jobo Tank: 6 images. With that I set off on the journey to Hamburg Cathedral.

My experiences at the Hamburg Cathedral

I was very surprised at how often I was asked when the Spring Cathedral opened today. They looked on the internet but saw no indication of the closure. No idea what people readOtherwise, there were only photographers around. When they saw my camera, they sometimes nodded, sometimes shook their heads. An interested conversation arose with a young Sony couple who asked how many megapixels my camera had. I couldn't answer the question, but let them both look through the viewfinder - or rather, at the screen. "Oops, that's all upside down..."

Of the 6 negatives I took with me, 5 even turned out to be something. In one case, I idiot actually pulled the wrong rear slider out of the negative compartment. I hadn't made that mistake yet, but I had heard about it. As I said: you can do a lot wrong with the format. To be on the safe side, I took another photo twice because the flags were blowing in the wind. There are still four motifs that I would like to show you here.

What else might be of interest…

I'm happy with the result of about an hour of photography. Not masterpieces, but a start. My buddy Marco then redefined the wording FPS on Twitter. Actually, that stands for Foars Per Second and describes the highest possible frequency of triggering. With Marco it became Fother pro Stunde – so it fits. 4FPS with the Linhof with 4 subjects is quite decent – ​​for a beginner like me.

I used the Kodak Tri-X 320, which is only available for sheet film. Exposure times towards the end of the afternoon were between 1/200s and 1/10s for the last image.

What doesn't come across here in the blog is the resolution that these negatives allow. On the swing carousel you can clearly see the weld points of the chain links. This brings us back to the question we heard above: "How many megapixels does it have?" I would estimate roughly 300 megapixels for the film.

In any case, I'm happy that a lot has worked so far. Hopefully it won't take too long until the next use...