• 1221: City House grain elevator & environs (18 Mar 2021. Kentmere Pan 100 @ EI 400. On top.)
  • 1219: Twin Cities metro area; Eau Claire, WI. (13-14 Mar 2021. Adox CMS 20 II Pro @ EI 20.)
  • 1218: Twin Cities metro area. (8-13 Mar 2021. Kodak Ektachrome E100 @ EI 100.)
  • 1216: Twin City Model Railroad Museum / Wicket Wort / Twin Cities. (28 Feb 2021. Bergger Pancro 400 @ EI 1600.)
  • 1215: Twin City Model Railroad Museum (28 Feb 2021. Iford HP5+ @ 400. On bottom.)

Heavier on the Rodinal here, and longer in the soup: these directions are a compromise that, I hope, will work well for all of the five waiting rolls that need extra development for one reason or another. Each has its own rationale for that: 1215 was probably underexposed by around two stops most of the time in the dark museum. 1216 was even more underexposed: it mostly (all?) used the 80-200mm zoom lens in the same environment, but that only opens to f/4.5. 1218 is my first experiment stand-developing Kodak Ektachrome in Rodinal; 100-speed Fuji films have worked well at approximately this setting before, though, so it seems like a good starting point for experiments. There’s no solid information that I could find about Adox CMS 20 II Pro, but I shot it at box speed and many people suggest it’s actually slower than that, perhaps by several stops (depending on lighting conditions), so letting it develop more is a way of hedging my bets. Roll 1221 was intentionally underexposed by two stops (i.e., shot at EI 400 instead of box speed) because that let me justify tossing it in with this batch, which needed a fifth roll.

Pre-wet film in tap water for over an hour. Changed water several times: something is bleeding a dark blue guck into the water. Also something brown. Kept changing water, but every soak produces new guck, so I gave up eventually and poured in the developer. Mixed 15.4mL Rodinal in 1L of water, poured that into the tank, then topped off the tank with water to ~1.15L. Agitated 20x over first 30 seconds, then 5x at 40:00. Switched orientation of tank at 40:00 to avoid bromide drag. Developed for 80:00.

After development, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68 degree tap water, filling the tank and emptying, then doing the same again, but agitating 5x, 10x, then 20x. Mixed a new batch of Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4, then fixed for 6 minutes (that’s now 17 rolls from this batch of fixer), inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of the every minute. Recaptured fixer and rinsed for five minutes, then emptied tank. Used Photo-Flo with distilled water, agitated 20x, emptied tank, shook rolls, and hung negatives vertically to dry.

Evaluation and notes

Roll 1215

Decent results with a little more depth of field now; the HP5+ does OK here but there still just isn’t enough light at EI 400.

HP5+ looks better in Caffenol.

Roll 1216

Pushing to EI 1600 didn’t work effectively here: there’s almost nothing on the frames from the museum. The rest has some decent shots, but pushing this seems to have flattened the response curve enough that it’s no longer visually pleasant. Still, a few nice shots on this roll.

Roll 1218

Non-HDR scans are much worse than with Fuji slide film, but HDR-based postprocessing really looks nice with some of these. There’s an awful lot of detail that the scanner seems to pull out but discard when saving to JPEG. I wonder if this could be corrected with different scanner settings (though if it could be, I probably would have stumbled across those settings by now). I wonder if the negatives would be clearer if I were using a bleach/fix combination, as with color film. Maybe it’s worth looking into.

But there are some nice shots on this roll, and the graveyard stuff in particular looks quite appropriately atmospheric.

Roll 1219

Film is really contrasty when developed in Rodinal: look at how the shadows at the beginning of the roll are totally black, even in the HDR scans. But it’s crisp and clear and pretty, and the response curve is gentle and pleasing. And the texture on the brickwork towards the end of the roll, and some places in the middle, is really just fantastic.

Next roll (already shot) is going to be developed in Caffenol, but I’m curious what the manufacturer’s recommended developer looks like on this film, too.

photos posted

Roll 1221

Kentmere 100 pushed to 400 doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle backlit subjects in the late afternoon, but a lot of this came out well, anyway. When not backlit. The texture on the sculpture is really beautiful; the buildings, less so, but they have less interesting texture anyway.

Shots of bridges would have benefited from a red/orange filter to darken the sky.

Still getting a few annoying shots like I’m holding the edge of my finger over the lens. Which I’m not, yeesh. It’s not negative-touching, either: it never bleeds onto adjacent negatives. Maybe poor spooling in the daylight changing bag? Negatives near the very end of the roll seem to have problems with light-piping, so maybe that’s what it is?

All in all, a middlin’ roll. I’m sort of coming around on this discount Ilford line, with the provisio about dynamic range when backlit.