Get round to it.
Cycles of thinking.
Getting round to it.
An experience that happens to me often in my life, and especially in the realm of photography and darkroom is: having many vague projects or jobs in the back of my mind that occasionally resurface and demand attention, such as ‘I really must get that ….. fixed’ or ‘That film needs using before it goes out of date’ etc. I’m sure that this is universal, though some people are better and getting things done and applying themselves to one task fully.
This is my experience whenever I go over to my studio/darkroom. There are so many jobs that need sorting and materials that are crying out to be used. With my easily distracted scatterbrain I can get involved in a distraction easily and forget the actual job I went over to do.
I have half used boxes of sheet films that have been given to me when friends gave up darkroom work, or someone’s relative died and they left materials that needed a home.
Many of these are out of date, some by a decade or more. I see them on the shelf and I’m tempted to load a few up and see how they perform, but that thought is usually disregarded for some other impulse.
I also have a box of lenses that might be of use on a large format camera, if I can be bothered to make a lens panel for any of them. One in particular came from a military surplus shop in Nottingham in 1993 and I shot with it for about six months until some other idea took over.
I saw it again the other day and decided to bring it home and make use of it. This lens is a 100mm f2.8 Pullin Pulnar and it has an image circle of four inches. This means that on a 5x4 camera it gives a circular image. If the lens is used wide open the shallow focus can be quite nice and the two features were what made me interested in using it all those years ago.
I remember at the time I did some interiors, then made a contact sheet of four negatives together showing aspects of the house I was living in then and it was used in a book called ‘The Big Issue Book Of Home’, which was published to raise awareness of homelessness.
This time I wanted to use a different film stock, partly to get a different look to last time, and partly as an excuse to use some of my vintage film. I went out with Lith film (1.5 ASA/ISO), X-Ray film (50 ASA/ISO), Kodak Panchro Royal (100 ASA/ISO) and some odd Kodak Diagnostic film (Very slow indeed). These are the results.
This is a phone shot for comparison.
I’m not the first to do this, there are some quite famous images by Emmet Gowin of his wife Edith that were shot using a lens which was too small for the format he was shooting on.
Of course the look could be faked in the darkroom with heavy vignette burning in, or with photoshop, but I prefer the surprise of looking at the screen on the camera and trying to compose a shot within a circle.
I have thoroughly enjoyed using this lens once more, I don’t know why it took me 33 years to pick it up again. I’m meeting up with an old photography friend in three days and we are both shooting 5x4. I will definitely be shooting some circular images on the day.
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Andrew Sanderson May 2026.
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I love these!
The tunnel look is good with the graveyard.