• (empty): empty space, no spool. (on top.)
  • 1286: Red Wing / Frontenac State Park on Lake Peppin / Hwy 10 NW of the Twin Cities / Monticello. (6–20 Feb 2022. Ilford PanF+ @ EI 50.)
  • 1271: UM Arboretum. (9 Oct 2021. Fomapan 400 as Lomography Lady Grey @ EI 400.)
  • 1295: Lyndale Park Rose Garden. (25 June 2022. Astrum FN-64 @ EI 64.)
  • 1292: Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park. (5 June 2022. hand-rolled Fomapan 100 @ EI 100.) (On bottom.)

More catch-up from my film backlog! Yeesh, I still have plenty to do. Only four rolls in the tank this time: putting a fifth spool in keeps the rubber top from gripping the tank as well as I’d like. All development here took place at 72 degrees, which was as low as I could get the cold water to come out of the ground. It’s close enough for stand development, anyway.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for about an hour, then rinsed several times just before development — the FN-64 continues to turn water water an interesting muddy blue. During the pre-soak, mixed 11.5 mL Rodinal in 1L tap water. Poured developer in and topped off with tap water. Agitated 20x over the first minute, then 5x times at 25:00. Initial agitations and halfway-point agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree inversion, then gently back).

After 50 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 72 degree water. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes (that’s now 22 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 1271

Lot to like in here. The film is crisp and the grain is restrained. Pretty much every shot is exposed well, and most have a likeable composition, too. I think the rolls is slightly overdeveloped, and this shows especially in shots 00, 05, most of 11-19. Some of the later shots are clearly underexposed, too. Maybe a quarter of the roll is shots that were salvaged though via-HDR postprocessing.

There’s some really nice photos that show off the texture of tree bark, but I think the real standouts on this roll are the photos of the sculpture garden at the Arboretum, especially the series on Mimmo Paladino’s 1984 Canto Notturno.

Really shows how Fomapan can shine when developing is done carefully.

Roll 1286

This is basically a loss, and that’s disappointing: there were some pretty good shots in here. Maybe this just sat too long before developing? PanF+ has the reputation of not holding a latent image well, though I don’t know whether a six-month delay in processing is hardly years and years, maybe it’s enough. If it’s not that, then this whole roll is badly underexposed.

Too bad, some cool stuff in here, but more or less nothing is salvageable. Even via-HDR postprocessing of raw files really only manages to achieve a demonstration that there was also some bromide drag here.

Roll 1292

A fun roll, I like this one. It basically makes up for the numerous minor disappointments of roll 1291, the subject matter of whose second half this roll shares. Again, Fomapan 100 looks good in Rodinal: crisp, mostly smooth but with just enough grain to provide texture. There’s some light piping (?) or other light damage on the first few shots, which is too bad because they might have been good otherwise; but there’s plenty to make up for it on the rest of the roll.

Some shots just don’t get enough visible separation between the foreground and the background (e.g., 05), which is a shame. But the shots were so visually cluttered in the first place that some of this is probably inevitable; it makes me realize another one of my visualization limitations when I’m pointing the camera at something. Often (e.g., 06) the via-HDR B/W version with the minimally nand-adjusted levels after automated postprocessing has much better visible separation than the equivalent scanned-as-color version with the levels that were adjusted while scanning. That frame is not the only time this has happened, of course; but it’s one of the more prominent examples of it.

Lots of really well-done pictures of the weird installations here, though. This roll is, overall, a gem.

photos posted

Roll 1295

There’s some really beautiful shots here: this is a good film to use to shoot flowers, with its relatively high contrast and its smooth, detailed texture. Grain is pretty low, too. Lots to like in the shots here.

But the problem is that the cartridges that Astrum loaded the film into are slightly smaller than standard size, so they sit awkwardly in the camera’s film cartridge compartment, and the film keeps jamming because it’s being pulled in a direction which is not quite perpendicular to the vertical axis of the film cartridge. But a film cartridge that can’t feed film into the camera and that keeps jamming isn’t usable film. The whole point of a standard is that everybody follows the standard.

So I should just anticipate that if I order more of this film from Astrum that I’ll have to repackage it into standard cartridges, I guess. Because losing half a roll of film because the only way it will move is back into the cartridge fucking sucks. So does getting a bunch of inadvertent half-double exposures.

photos posted