First tank:

  • 1274: Swing Bridge Park, Inver Grove Heights, MN. (13 Oct 2021. FP4+ @ EI 125) (on top.)
  • 1273: Clear Lake cemetery / Rice, MN. (11 Oct 2021. HP5+ @ EI 400) (on bottom.)

Second tank:

  • 1308: Gov’t Mule at Canterbury Park, Shakopee, MN. (16 Aug 2022. HP5+ @ EI 400) (on top.)
  • 1275: Cherokee Regional Park, St Paul, MN. (13 Oct 2021. FP4+ @ EI 125) (on bottom.)

Four more rolls, in two groups of two each in two-roll tanks, developed at the same time as rolls 1287/1289/1308/1317 are in the five-roll tank. Each tank has one roll of HP5+ at EI 400 and one roll of FP4+ at EI 125.

During the pre-soak, mixed 1L Caffenol CL in ~850mL water, then topped off to 1L. 16g waterfree washing soda, 10g Vitamin C, 40g iodized salt , and 40g Essential Everyday instant coffee, St Paul tap water. Poured into tank. Agitated 20x over first minute, then 5x over 15 seconds at 30:00. These are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree inversion, then gently back). Kept orientation the same throughout development.

After 60 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68 degree water, filling and emptying the tank until the water rinsed completely clear, then four more times. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes (that’s now 26 rolls from this batch of fixer), inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. Recaptured fixer and rinsed for ten minutes, then emptied tank, added a few drops of Photo-Flo, filled tank again and agitated 20x, and hung negatives vertically to dry.

Evaluation and notes

Roll 1273

Still somewhat overexposed here: the whole roll is shot with a red filter, which mostly works but throws off the exposure metering a little bit. But scanning consciously pulls a lot out, and there are some nice pictures on this roll.

Most notably for me are the early shots of the cemetery showing the adjacent corn field; there’s a real Children of the Corn vibe to shots 2–4 and, to a lesser extent, some of the next few. Much of the rest of the cemetery shots have really pleasing geometry in their compositions, too: especially 7–10, 12, and 14. There are some nice lighting effects in the sequence. And some of the landscapes in the second half of the roll are also quite pleasant: 26 has a pleasingly dynamic composition and so does 28; there are nice afternoon-lighting effects in 38, 30, 31. Lots of really nice tree photos here, often showing the influence of Ansel Adams.

Once again, the color scans often seem to have more depth and better separation than the via-HDR scanning equivalents, and the via-HDR shots often have more detail in the midtones, e.g. the sky.

Contrast is lower on this roll than on a lot of HP5+ developed in coffee. I wonder why.

photos posted

Roll 1274

More experiments with a red filter, which is how all shots in this roll were taken. This is my first visit to Swing Bridge Park.

This largely came out fine, though it’s a little muddy and low-contrast in a few places, especially when light is comparatively low: 9 and several of 12-16, for instance. This roll really shows off the lens’s vignetting, too. But sometimes it all combines into a weirdly nostalgic effect: 17, for instance. And there’s some pleasing geometry in 24 and, yes, also 21. Once in aa while the filter helps with separation and this makes for some nice landscape shots, occasionally, as in 25. Sometimes the red filter is an impediment to separation, as in much of 28–31, which the dark brown of the wood goes to a very muddy dark gray. 32 is a nicely framed shot, though.

Once again, via-HDR scanning brings out a lot of detail in clouds.

Roll 1275

Again, largely seems underdeveloped. Starting to be more skeptical of FP4+ in Caffenol CL; though I’ve had successes in the past, they all seem, in retrospect, to have been very well lit scenes. Lots of this is just dim (e.g., most of 5–11), even though they were most or all more or less correctly exposed at the time. There’s often little visual separation between types of vegetation here, which makes it hard to visually parse what the structure of the pictured things is. Once in a while, though, the raw-to-HDR processing pipeline salvages something nice from an otherwise low-contrast or dark negative (e.g., 21).

There’s not much in the subject matter most of the time, either. Frankly, this is not one of my more successful rolls.

Roll 1308

Same general observations as roll 1307, which was also HP5+ shot at the same time and similarly developed.