First tank:

  • 1303: Frank Turner at Fargo Brewing, Fargo, ND. (11 July 2022. HP5+ @ EI 1600) (on top.)
  • 1302: Frank Turner at Fargo Brewing, Fargo, ND. (11 July 2022. HP5+ @ EI 1600) (on bottom.)

Second tank:

  • 1301: Frank Turner at Fargo Brewing, Fargo, ND. (11 July 2022. HP5+ @ EI 1600) (on top.)
  • 1298: Failure at the Turf Club, St. Paul / Mississippi Headwaters @ Lake Itasca / Fort Ransom State Park, North Dakota. (2–10 July 2022. HP5+ @ EI 1600) (on bottom.)

Four more rolls, in two groups of two each in two-roll tanks, developed at the same time as rolls 1276/77/78/79 and 1296 are in the five-roll tank. All are HP5+ at EI 1600, all from recent concerts.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for about ten minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 13 mL Rodinal in 1L tap water. Poured developer in and topped off with tap water. Agitated 40x over the first minute, then one single inversion at 40:00. Initial agitations are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree inversion, then gently back). There are none, so it looks like the lids are correctly matched to the tanks again.

After 80 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68 degree water. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 5 minutes (that’s now 9 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 1298

Something I didn’t expect to see, though in retrospect it makes sense: the first half of the roll is basically unusable; almost all of the development happened in the second half, the part of the film that was exposed in plenty of light. Makes sense, though: the better-exposed parts of the roll had more affinity for the Rodinal than the darker shots in the first half of the roll. This is maybe exacerbated by the fact that these rolls were developed with only 3mL Rodinal/roll, which is half the recommended minimum. Maybe the shots at the beginning would have turned out if there had been fewer rolls in the tank with the same amount of developer.

Nice, clear shots at the end of the roll, though, aside from those last few, a couple of which were marred by not being spearated on the reels. But sometimes here the extra contrast from pushing works well (e.g., 34A).

photos posted

Rolls 1301–1303

Difficult shooting situation, but I think that a lot of usable shots came out of it. The venue was of course too dark to use the light meter in the K-1000, so it was guessing, varying the shutter speed, and stand-developing. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good a lot of the time!

All in all, though, many — perhaps most — shots are overexposed relative to the development procedure: in future, for a similar shooting circumstance, I’d like to stop down a few stops, or perhaps use a faster shutter speed. (Though really, in the future, I think using a different SLR, one whose light meter doesn’t automatically turn off in when the light is low, would be a better solution, now that I have an additional film SLR.)

But they’re not so overexposed as to be unrecoverable, expecially by scanning to HDR and tonemapping. There’s lots of little gems in here, and I have to say that my timing for the shutter button was pretty good on this show. (Perhaps more than a little bit of that is because Frank Turner puts on such a good show. Especilly in a small venue.) The problem with overexposure is, of course, nowhere more of a problem than on faces, and the shots that are genuinely unusable are the shots where the faces are entirely blown out.

Shots where the faces are more or less totally blown out also demonstrate the inverse-square loaw quite nicely a lot of time: I was standing closer to Turner than to his backup musician, Matt Nasir; there are plenty of shots where Frank’s face is almost entirely blown out but Nasir’s is well within range for an acceptable exposure, even though the two are about evenly lit in most or all shots. Light bouncing off Nasir of course is traveling further and spreading out more than is light coming from Turner.

I really like the photos of the crowd, too, few of them as there are. Good crowd there at the Frank Turner concert at the Fargo Brewing Company.

photos posted