• 1296: Failure at the Turf Club, St. Paul, MN. (2 July 2022. HP5+ @ EI 1600) (on top.)
  • 1279: The House on the Rock. (21 Oct 2021. Street Candy ATM 400 @ EI 1600.)
  • 1278: The House on the Rock. (21 Oct 2021. Bergger Pancro 400 @ EI 1600.)
  • 1277: The House on the Rock. (21 Oct 2021. HP5+ @ EI 1600.)
  • 1276: The House on the Rock. (21 Oct 2021. Fomapan 400 as Arista .EDU 400 @ EI 1600.) (On bottom.)

I haven’t developed any film since before I moved in November! I’ve got quite a backlog. Starting with five rolls of 400-speed film pushed to 1600: four from The House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin; one from a recent concert.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for about ten minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 15.4 mL Rodinal in 1L tap water. Poured developer in and topped off with tap water. Agitated 40x over the first minute, then ten times at 40:00. Initial agitations are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree inversion, then gently back). Mixed up a new batch of Ilford Rapid Fixer during development.

After 80 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68 degree water. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 5 minutes (that’s now 5 rolls from this batch of fixer), inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. Dumped fixer and rinsed for ten minutes in tap water, then emptied tank, added a few drops of Photo-Flo, filled tank with tap water and agitated 20x, and hung negatives vertically to dry.

Evaluation and notes

Roll 1276

I take back what I said about Fomapan 400 not being as crisp as the 100-speed. Fomapan 400 in Rodinal and pushed two stops looks pretty good.

In particular, there’s an awful lot of texture here in the subject matter that the natural grain of the film looks good with: stone (02, 06), carved wood (04), finished wood (10), cast iron (36), etc.

The via-HDR scanning/processing technique is again paying off here with some really beautiful lighting at times (the indirect light of 06)

Contrast works really well in a lot of places here. The shadows of 10 are really pleasant. But there are of course places in the House on the Rock where even pushing the film to 1600 doesn’t help much (e.g., much of 16–22). But sometimes scanning the negatives in color helps drag more detail out of a muddy, underexposed shot (36). (And sometimes not: 40.) Often the color scan “feels more vibrant” or appears to have more depth (46).

Roll 1277

Darker than the previous roll, but it’s shot in some darker parts of the attraction. In a few cases (05A, 19A), the darkness works well. Mostly, though, it’s just that shots didn’t come out because it wasn’t possible to expose them enough. It’s perfectly clear, in any case, that lighting for photography is not high on their list of goals. Of course, there’s no obvious reason why it should be.

When they do come out, though, there’s plenty of texture (e.g., 08A and the last few shots in the roll) and nice, fine grain. All in all, I’m pleased with how this roll came out, given the available lighting.

Roll 1278

I’m still not sure how I feel about Bergger Pancro, and this is the last of the rolls I ordered. There is in fact a lot to like here: the grain is prominent but kind of soft, and has a very likable appearance. When the subject is well lit (e.g., 02A), the film it a dreamy, slightly soft kind of appearance that’s not like anything else I’ve shot with. But when it’s not (e.g., 01A, 04A, 09A, quite a few others in this roll), well, the shadows get murky and details is lost and it just doesn’t push as well as HP5+ or Fomapan in comparable lighting. Some of the more successful (and well-lit) shots on this roll have a pleasingly retro look (10A) much like TV shows from the 1950s.

The film’s texture works really, really well on figures from the carousel (e.g., 12A, 14A, 18A), really showing off some of the underlying wood texture even though it has of course mostly been painted over. Of course getting reliably exposed and focused and timed images from a low-light object in constant motion is difficult, and there’s plenty of shots in that part of the roll that didn’t work out for one reason or another. Getting foreground/background separation is also sometimes difficult (13A, 17A, 19A), and stand-development enhances this problem by compressing the dynamic range.

There is, again, plenty that is just not exposed enough in the last third or so of the roll.

Roll 1279

Again, this film just isn’t intended to be pushed to 1600, or at least not the way I did it. The detail is there, and it’s impressive that the film records it, but the end result here is mostly not aesthetically pleasing: there’s something sucked out of the images that would make them more, well, vivacious. (Porbably part of this is trying to push the film, and part of it is stand-development reducing the dynamic range.) The film base and emulsion are also really easy to damage in handling, and the film has an annoying tendency to curl way too much. This roll has a 1950s TV show look similar to roll 1278, but I like this instantiation of it less.

I’m not in a hurry to shoot more of this, to be frank. But maybe I just need to give it another chance in different circumstances.

Roll 1296

The film mostly looks good — shots that are useless due to pushing two stops notwithstanding — and the technical aspects of film exposure are basically on-point. THe problem is that my position for the concert was shit. Which is too bad, because the shots of the band really are basically good, and this is basically how I should be pushing HP5+ to EI 1600.

Small criticism: slightly more agitation would be smart; there’s a little bit of bromide drag visible on a few frames.

There are a few frames that might be usable with extensive cropping. But most of the roll is a loss because I was too far from the stage and didn’t try to get a medium-length zoom lens in.