My name is Montague, I was born in picturesque Basel, Switzerland but moved to Beijing in 2003, where I live and work as a director for film and advertising. In my personal photography work I only ever work on film. Lately I have been travelling around Europe with my Chamonix 45n2 camera and shoot experimental large format.

Always on the lookout for the new and unorthodox, I discovered the IMAGO Direct Positive Paper ISO6 at Ars-Imago, the local analogue photography store in Zurich. It is the hardest film stock I ever shot with. The ISO rating drifts between 3-6 ISO depending on the color content of the light you work with. There are two ways of shooting it, with and without pre-flash. Pre-flash enhances the dynamic range and make the film more useable. Without pre-flash, the dynamic range is tiny and a slight misjudgment of exposure can render an image unusable.

However the times when you get it just right, the film repays you with an extraordinary positive image, incredible rendering of detail, thick black and a beautiful shiny silver ILFOCHROME look. The film comes in the normal LF sizes, can be loaded under red light and developed in normal B/W paper developer in a tray or processor.

Here are my five…

If you aim at dramatic extremely high contrast scenarios straight out of the box, this film is your friend. Shooting without pre-flash into the sun will trigger solarization and render the sun black which is perfect for my experimental work on solar photography of late.

~ Montague Fendt

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4 responses to “5 Frames… With IMAGO Direct Positive Paper (EI 6 / 4×5 format / Chamonix 45n2)”

  1. These are incredibly interesting – they really do draw me in to look at them several times. Thanks very much for sharing these, I may have to look into how to use this film myself sometime.

  2. Wow Montague, those are wonderful pictures, the nude is especially good.

    When you have to look twice or more at a picture in order to see what is going on, you know you are onto something.

  3. Agreed Nils. WOW !!!

 

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