Ultra Long Exposures on Film

wide open, without neutral density filters on HP5 (or any black and white film)

Russel Kwan

Click here for Russel Kwan and Wendy Kwan Black and White Fine Art Photography Home Page

I'm getting ready to publish the techniques, chemical formulas and processing steps needed to make these pictures.
I am looking for suitable partners to start this enterprise - please contact me if you are interested.

I think I'm the only one in the world that can do this today.

I kind of fell into researching very long exposures and carried on into inventing the specialized chemistry that makes hyper-exposure on film possible, thanks to a generous colleague, Richard Knotts, who introduced me to the work of Justin Quinnell in the UK, which led to the work of Tarja Trygg in Finland.  Although their work and technique is very different from mine, their photographs, made with pinhole cameras, capture up to six months of sun arcs in a single picture.  Trygg has a long term project to photograph sun arcs from all over the world – if you wish to participate, go to his website and sign up!

Trygg and Quinnell's technique involves placing black and white print paper in the pinhole camera, and after (perhaps) months of exposure, flatbed scanning the unprocessed paper, followed by digital processing to create their final result.  Quinnell has an excellent description of his process on his website.

I was intrigued and amazed by their work, and since my personal practice doesn’t involve digital methods, I set about seeing if I could create printable film-based negatives after massive and unreasonable overexposure.  In addition, I wanted a useful advantage of film over photo paper: film has a panchromatic response (while paper is orthochromatic), which allows film to capture a wider, and more natural (whatever that is) tonal scale.

After a great many attempts and failures, I’ve created a two-stage film development process that seems to permit arbitrary overexposure and yet produce normal negatives that can be printed in an entirely conventional manner. 

For example, one of the photographs in my current series was made on a sunny day (the sun’s arc spans the entire picture): a 6 hour exposure at f/4.5 on HP5 4x5 sheet film, with no filters.  My back-of-the envelope calculation shows a 22 stop overexposure, some 4,000,000 times more exposure than “normal”.

Finally, many thanks to Stephen Anchell and Bill Troop for their terrific book, “The Film Developing Cookbook” - I got my copy through Amazon.  While you won’t find my little invention in there, there are a great many clues to light the path.

This new ability to make lens and film-based photographs with arbitrarily long exposures has freed me to explore the effects of time.  Now, I just need more time to play with it - this medium is not particularly prolific - at most, I can make just one exposure per day. There are more experiments in the works…

This photograph was made 21-24 January 2009, with four full days of exposure: two sunny days and two foggy days, with a pinhole camera (see my Drãnoflex article for information about my homemade pinhole camera - and how you can make a Drãnoflex).  The sun arcs across the sky show the reciprocity failure brought about by extreme overexposure – much like Ansel Adam’s “The Black Sun, Owens Valley, California 1939”. Most of the other funny looking artifacts are light leaks around my pinholed piece of beer can - I need a better light seal if I'm going to leave the Drãnoflex outside for a long time.

17 March 2009:

I've been asked about that foggy look of these pictures: the effect is chemical fog caused by a physical development property of the chemistry I'm using. Earlier pictures have much more of this fog, but later refinements of the chemistry have made the fog go away almost completely. However, I've come to really like the fog, so I'm working on methods to re-introduce the fog in a controlled manner. Stay tuned!

18 May 2009:

I've been working the past couple of months to rebalance the chemistry to make the sunstreaks look more like daytime rather than nighttime. I've also tried to capture some of the moments of spring here in Vancouver - kinda hard as spring this year was very cold and wet. Anyways, there has been progress...

3 day exposure, Drãnoflex. Chemistry rebalanced to look more like daylight.

Summer 2010

I've started taking this technique out on the road - building a new body of work. It's still not clear exactly what the visual language needs to be, but I'm working on it.

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Winter 2011

I've developed a reliable means to photograph scenes that read as day+night, as well as improved the tonal scale of the negatives to yield much clearer and brighter prints.