Hakendover happening

Hakendover is a little village, just outside the provincial town of Tienen in central Belgium. It used to be an important destination for pilgrims in medieval times. Every year on Easter Monday there is a religious procession involving more than a hundred horses: they move through the village to the top of a small hill overlooking the area. There the horses run three rounds after which they are blessed. This custom can probably be retraced to pre-Christian fertility rites. It still is a colourful happening, and of obvious interest to photographers.

Attracted by a beautiful Hakendover-portfolio built up over many years by my friend Willy Robbeets, I visited the event for the first time in 2005. This year there was a larger delegation of our photo club (Fotogroep Park-Heverlea). Our intention was to gather material for a black-and-white slide show.

I have never worked with black-and-white slide film. Agfa Scala used to be the reference in this area. Now, with the demise of Agfa, Scala has disappeared. But Rollei has quickly come up with an alternative. The Maco/Rollei 820 IR film, exposed at 100 asa, allows for positive development and results in very nice, slightly warm, contrasty, almost glowing chromes. This is what people tell about this film on the net:

"This film posses exceptional image quality, even better than SCALA. R-IR has an incredible dmax @ 3.8, producing the same stark ortho-type look of scala-film but better tonal range, sharpness and detail. R-IR has also an exceptional exposure latitude, 25iso-400iso. This film has also a true contrast control!" (see www.dr5.com).

The results are indeed impressive. And the good news is also that these chromes scan very, very easily. There is hardly any tweaking necessary to get a perfect, contrasty image on screen. The only thing I noticed is that I have to sharpen up the image more compared to a negative. No idea why that is, because to the naked eye the chromes look ultra-sharp. It may be one of the quirks of my Epson 3200 flatbed scanner.

I an now very keen to experiment a bit further with this film. What about trying on 4x5'? I have never seen a black-and-white 4x5' chrome, but when well done it must be spectacularly beautiful. So I am definitely going to give it a go.

I am buying these films from Guy Meurs in Diest, who is sourcing a lot of these niche black-and-white products from Germany. For development he sends them on to a specialised lab in Stuttgart. They are back in just 3 days.

The picture shown above was taken with my Contax Aria with Distagon 2.8/25mm on Rollei IR820 exposed at 100 asa.