• 1258: Bauhaus Brewing / Clemson-Munsinger Gardens, St. Cloud, MN (17–18 July 2021. Street Candy ATM @ EI 400.) (On top.)
  • 1256: Cathedral of St. Paul / Minneapolis. (5–12 July 2021. FPP Berlin Kino = Orwo N74 @ EI 400.)
  • 1255: Fireworks from Quarry Park, Eagan, MN. (4 July 2021. Ilford Delta 3200 @ EI 1000.)
  • 1253: New Ulm, MN / Eagan / St. Paul / Forestville, MN. (12 June–4 July 2021. HP5+ @ EI 400)
  • 1250: Michigan (3–4 June 2021. Ilford HP5+ @ EI 400.) (On bottom.)

Five different rolls, all shot at box speed, several films I’ve never before developed shot and developed. Developed on 35mm rolls in the five-roll tank. This is just a standard eighty-minute semi-stand development with one agitation interval after the first minute.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for about half an hour. During the pre-soak, mixed 12 mL Rodinal in 1L distilled water. Poured developer in and topped off with distilled water. Agitated 40x over the first minute then 10x at 40:00. These are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree inversion, then gently back). Kept orientation the same throughout development: this larger tank leaks a bit.

After 80 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68 degree water. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes (that’s now 10 rolls from this batch of fixer), inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. Dumped fixer and rinsed for ten minutes, then emptied tank, added a few drops of Photo-Flo, filled tank with distilled water and agitated 20x, and hung negatives vertically to dry.

Evaluation and Notes

Roll 1250

Photos of the squirrel on the first half of the roll came out well, overall: it was moving quickly and not stopping often and it largely came out well. Wish I’d used a red filter to help it stand out from the grass, but then I don’t have one that fits on the zoom lens I was using.

Tree, bark, lichen textures on the rest of the roll are some of my favorite tree pictures I’ve ever taken.

I really love HP5+ in Rodinal.

photos posted

Roll 1253

Again, HP5+ in Rodinal looks fantastic. Therse are almost all quite well executed, though the horizontal plane needs to be kept more accurately horizontal in some places. The exposure, focus, and development are all on-point, though.

Brick texture is very nice. Bark, too. There’s some uneven development late in the roll, in the Forestville photos.

photos posted

Roll 1255

Some of my favorite results I’ve had from Delta 3200. I was starting to think that this film wasn’t ever going to work well with Rodinal stand development.

There’s some really pretty photos of fireworks here, and the film really records a lot of details in the texture. I’m pleased to see that my sense of timing mostly paid off here, too: lots of just-the-right-moment shots, some of which capture a whole chunk of explosions in different parts of their sequences. Again, scanning as color sometimes results in interesting effects, including an enhanced sense of depth.

photos posted

Roll 1256

Too much grain on this roll. Should probably try the film with another developer if I use it again. There’s a lot to like about Orwo N74, though, and I want to give it another shot in, say, HC-110 or D-96.

The grain almost works well with some of the cathedral shots (05, 07, 08, 09). And there are places where it’s less prominent, subsumed in more noticeable texture features like brick (11–13, 19) or the dome of the cathedral (14).

There’s a lot of atmosphere in this roll, but too much grain in a lot of it.

Roll 1258

Really interesting film: good response curve, some grain but not unmanageable, even with Rodinal. Lighting tends to work better without via-HDR scanning than with it: scanning to HDR and then tonemapping seems to flatten out contrast more than normal on this stock, elminating or muting lighting effects that the film itself supports (negatives #2 and 4, for instance). On the other hand, with larger discrepancies in lighting (3), HDR scanning and tonemapping tends to reduce the glare.

In flat outdoor lighting, contrast is much reduced (9), and stand-souping in Rodinal doesn’t help with underexposure much on this film. There’s not much interesting about the last couple of shots at Bauhaus for that reason. But the shots at the park in St. Cloud are sometimes gorgeous for the texture that the film gives. Even with a very very even response curve, there’s good separation between objects: local contrast is sometimes quite high (13, 33).

It’s hard to get solid whites here: they come out gray. Maybe exposing at a lower ISO, say 250?

There’s a lot to like about this stock: atmosphere, good object separation, even response curve, good detail capture. Lighting effects are sometimes gorgeous. I’ll be shooting this again.

photos posted