Photograph of an old railway bridge over River Spey

I am spending more time in the darkroom just now, catching up on a backlog of unprinted negatives intended for my Also Scotland[*] project. Last week I was working on three prints from 4x5 negatives taken in 2021 in the Buckie area of Speyside. They all came out to my satisfaction, but the On the Speyside Way print stands out, it came out exactly as I pictured it back then when taking it, and it’s always satisfying when things come together like that.

It took a bit of work with the camera back then, the path is quite busy both with walkers and cyclists, so I couldn’t place the tripod on it, and it needed lot of camera movements to get it as I wanted, working at the limit of the lens’ image circle (Fujinon-W 5.6/125mm), so I had to crop the image a bit (you can see a bit of the fallout in the top right corner, which I deliberatly left there).

The above is a photo of the actual 16”x12” print, printed on Fomabrom Variant 112 fibre-based paper, bleached and selenium toned. Of course, digital photos of silver gelatine prints never do them entirely justice, the difference between reflected and emitted light seems unsurmountable to me, but it’s quite close, at least on my screen.

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[*] The Also Scotland project explores Scottish landscape beyond the conventional landscape photography framing. Some background to that can be found here, here, and here. I have been collecting material for this since 2019, and am slowly getting to a point I might be able to do something with it, though I have not decided yet what. 🙂