I finally found a way to mount the camera to a tripod securely and managed to get it out of the house. My initial tests had unexposed corners and seemed to have a fairly narrow field of view. This second round of tests changed all of that though, as the entire 4x5 frame is exposed (yay!) though the contrast was much, much worse than the first round of tests. The field of view is shown to be very wide in these tests. I haven't done any calculations yet, but upon developing the frames I was shocked. In the second photo I had actually moved the camera part way through the exposure because I was so certain that part of the building was out of the frame. This is really exciting, as having a wide field of view means you can get better pictures up close, and if there's one down side to these shots it's that they're too far away for capturing any reasonable amount of detail.
I will have to do some more systematic testing over the next week as I haven't been incredibly diligent about metering or my chemistry. I have been using a light meter app on my phone as it allows for a huge range of apertures, but it has some degree of matrix metering that seems to throw everything off in weird applications such as this. As for my chemicals, I have been using the same paper developer for every frame thus far, and that's perfectly fine---it is meant to be reused over and over---except that I only made up a very small quantity right off the bat. Repeated use wouldn't affect the concentration much for a large volume of developer, but when it is barely covering the paper it might see a rapid decrease in potency. This could be why the contrast is worse than before, though that could also be because I wasn't working in artificial light. To improve contrast however I might try using a normal printing filter from my enlarger. These filters come in a range of strengths, and are often numbered 0-6. In the darkroom, I often use a 2-3 for my prints, so I might want to step it up a little more for this situation as the contrast is pretty low. One thing to consider is that when you go to a 2.5 filter or above, you usually double the exposure of your print in the darkroom. So this might mean I will have to double my exposures for the camera, from about 2 to 4 minutes. Lots of things to consider!
Edit: The swirly edges of the second shot, to me at least, indicate uneven development. The chemicals are probably playing a big role at this point.
