Midday Sunlight in King’s Cross
King’ Cross, London | Jan 2025
Mamiya 645 | 55mm | Delta 400 (800) | Ilfotec DD-X | V800 Pro, VueScan, Negative Lab Pro | Lightroom, Photoshop, Camera Raw.
January continues to offer up grey, shadowless days with little respite. One morning recently, a bright yellow sun peered out of my Claer Outside weather app*, promising a sunny-filled day with a 20% high cloud cover. Whilst totally cloudless days can be great, a small amount of high cloud can offer softer shadows* with detail visible on correctly exposed negative films.
Loading Delta 400 into my Mamiya 645 but rating it at 800 iso would allow me to use relatively narrow apertures (f11 and f16), ensuring a comfortably large depth of field*. I arrived at the location near Granary Square King’s Cross around midday, with students from the London College of Communication spilling out onto the walkways. I had ample opportunity to compose and capture a number of silhouettes of the groups as they enjoyed a brief moment away from their creations and out in the midday sunshine.
With a large dynamic range evident between the highlights and shadows, I was aware that the film might struggle to capture sufficient detail in both the brightest highlights and deepest shadows. In addition, I was concerned that pushing Delta 400 by even one stop would increase the contrast of the film*, reducing its dynamic range. I was also likely to see an increase in film grain.* Although Ilford Delta has a tabular rather than a cubic grain structure*, giving it an improved resolution and finer grain than its older cubic grain cousins (HP5 and HP5 plus), the grain also becomes more pronounced as the film is progressively pushed.*
When metering the scene, I realised that my choice of where to place middle-grey would have a significant effect on the final result.* I was using Mamiya’s prism finder, which has an integrated meter with both spot and integrated average scene measurement settings.* With such a large dynamic range in the scene, I felt it important to exclude the direct flare of the sunlight from the camera’s exposure calculations. I used the Mamiya 645’s exposure lock facility* to take readings away from the direct sunlight flare, allowing a more representative and achievable range of tones to be included in the internal meter’s calculations.*
Despite my cautious approach to metering, I still found myself having to work hard in both the conversion stages with Negative Lab Pro and in Camera Raw to minimise the extent of the flare, retain sufficient detail in the walkway stonework, while optimising the rim lim lit subjects within the frame. in such conditions, some degree of compromise is always necessary. In this case, I allowed some of the foreground shadow areas to fall to black.*
Overall, I like the look and feel of the image. It portrays a bright, crisp, authentic wintery scene in the heart of London, full of life, people and energy.
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