Lithing a Wedding

  As alluded to in my previous post i recently took some photos at a friends wedding.  Jess had been grabbed last minute to do the official photos when the hired photographer broke his ankle on the stag do, so i got roped in to help her out.  I don’t mind doing it but i wouldn’t like to shoot a whole wedding on my own!  I took along my Bronica SQ-A kit as usual but decided to also bring my new charity shop acquired Yashica FR-1 because it has TTL metering so i could just point and shoot away throughout the day and save the Bronica film for more ‘special’ shots.  

  The day went well overall although the weather was a bit naff;  cold, wet and grey  so Jess didn’t have long to get in the photos she needed before everyone ran back inside.  I mostly just used my Bronica in the service during the talk and then the vows because i knew that Kodak Tri-X in Rodinal would give a nice look to the photos.  The Yashica i took outside and loaded with some Ilford Delta 400 which i got given when i bought my darkroom kit.  Im not very experienced in Delta type films and had heard bad things about tghem in Rodinal, but to be honest i couldn’t be bothered mixing up any PMK Pyro when it came to development.  I shot it at box speed and developed.  Being unused to 35mm as i only shoot 120 film the grain took me by surprise.  I knew i wouldn’t be making any massive prints from this film!  As Keith (the groom) had told me he liked the lith photos i have been uploading to my social networks lately i decided to lith one of the better frames from the roll.  I recently won some Fotospeed Lith paper (now discontinued) on EBay so i decided to use a sheet of that with some LD20.  It worked really well and i like the final result:

  This paper responded really well to selenium toning – starting off very yellow before shifting to pinkish red, then plum, then to this cooler blue.  I may experiment with just leaving it in selenium for half an hour or so and documenting the colours you can get.

  I haven’t really touched any of the wedding pictures from the Bronica roll yet as i have been focused on the marsh print (see previous post) but ill hopefully get chance to have a little play later in the week sometime.