Still catching up on my film backlog! Still have plenty to do. First time shooting all four of these film types. More firsts!

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~30 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed 10 mL HC-110 into ~900mL tap water. Poured developer in to the four-roll tank and topped off the tank with tap water. Agitated 40x over the first sixty seconds or so, knocked on the tank several times to dislodge bubbles, and let it sit for one hour. Gave ten additional agitations at 30:00. All agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 60 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 70 degree water. Fixed in Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes, inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. (That’s now 19 rolls of film fixed in this batch of fixer.)_Reclaimed 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 1348

This first roll of Derev Pan looks really gorgeous. I think I’ll be stand-developing more Derev Pan in HC-110.

Nice texture on the shots from the Deshanbe teahouse: there’s some fine detail recorded on the tile and other mosaic work (03) and the woodcarved surfaces (04, 05, 06), as well as on the vegetation, both outside (02) and inside (11). Food (07) doesn’t look great, but hey, food photography is a whole separate thing, and there was no effort made to prep this for photography.

The Denver industrial landscapes (12–16) are all right, but they sky really shows the grain more here. Two-pass scanning to a digital negative that gets tonemapped helps pull some detail back into the overexposed skies, but also shows the grain more in the sky. But the shots at Capulin volcano really show off what Derev Pan can do: there’s nice separation in green tones in vegetation (e.g. 17), and the near-infrared sensitivity eally cuts through the haze that was out there that day. This is pretty fine-grained for a 400-speed film, too, and it really shows off the texture on the geological formations (e.g., 18, 19).

This film is relatively high contrast in HC-110, too, and it works well for the semi-ghost town of Glenrio in late March, when the trees haven’t yet begun to put out leaves yet. The extended spectral sensitivity really makes the town look desolate, highlighting the patches of dead grass in the dark dirt. It highlights patches of rust on metal, too.

I think I’ll be shooting more Derev Pan and stand-developing it in HC-110.

photos posted

Roll 1349

First roll in my new Minolta, which I really enjoy shooting with. First roll of Film Washi Z. First time in this part of New Mexico. Lots of firsts here!

This film looks really beautiful in HC-110, and I think I’ll be shooting more of it. Lots of mineral spotting, though—or maybe it’s some sort of emulsion damage? In any case, it should be washed in distilled water, and I guess handling it even more carefully wouldn’t hurt here.

There’s plenty to like about this film stock. Most noticeably, the sales verbiage was correct: the extended spectral sensitivity really does help with separation of green tones and looks really beautiful with landscapes. There’s a really intense look to the dirt and dead grass of the late Colorado/New Mexico winter in the early and late shots of the roll (e.g., 05, 09, 21–26). There are places where distant objects in the haze look overexposed, but tonemapping a two-pass digital negative tends to bring them back (e.g., the mountains in the distance in 15). The near-infrared-range sensitivity really does help to cut through haze, too: the photos from Capulin Volcano (16–20) hardly show any of the extensive haze that was visible that day.

photos posted

Roll 1354

Boy, there certainly is a lot of damage to the emulsion here: plenty of scratching. The base is quite thin, which may have been part of the problem. This appears to be fixable sometimes, as when it happens more or less entirely in dark areas of the frame (12, 13). It may be that washing needs to be done more gently? There’s also less dynamic range (this is a problem in, e.g., 07 and 09; and compare 14 to the near-identical shot, #32, taken in the same spot at the same time on PanF+, on roll 1352, which has a higher dynamic range) than I’d like, although the flip side is apparently that there’s plenty of shadow detail up to a certain point—after which it ramps down very quickly.

There are some nice, moody textures here (01), and the film does relatively well indoors, even compared to other 400-speed films: 02–03 are nice indoor covert street shots that separate brights from shadows well, although I have nothing particularly wonderful to praise about the composition. Landscapes are kind of promising: there’s something broody and ephemeral about shots like 05 and 06, but the transition from bright to brighter at the bottom of both frames is rather jarring.

The extended spectral sensitivity doesn’t help with vegetation in the way that it does with Derev Pan and Film Washi Z: all vegetation comes out to be the same neutral gray in the first half of the roll, where what’s shown is basically dead winter grass and scrub brush. But the trees/dead grass divide in 18 and later is actually quite effective; the Colorado mountain shots are wonderful there, with 19 having a pleasant set of striations: medium gray for the brush in the foreground, dark gray for the trees in the distance, and medium gray for the dead grass in the far distance. 20 and 21 have a similar set of bands separating the background into variable-distance strips, and 22, from a different highway stop, do the same thing, but with framing around the landscape.

The film also serves really well for the architectural shots on the Basilica Church of St Mary, at the end of the roll (26 and later): nice textures for the stonework and the metal, and the relatively high contrast in the low-angled sun is quite striking, visually.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the roll; the relatively low dynamic range and the need to take extra care to avoid emulsion damage are downsides, though.

Roll 1356

First time shooting Film Ferrania P30. It’s a nice, contrasty film with plenty of shadow detail and nice, sharp edges. It’s relatively easy to overexpose in the highlights (e.g,, 01, 04), but that rarely or never blows out all of the detail, and detail can be recovered in post-processing easily enough. It really does make the architecture shots quite attractive: emphasizing lines and textures and shapes (03, 19, 29) while preserving some detail in both shadow and highlight is a really good look for the church buildings here. The cityscape (05) is less attractive; partly that’s a lack of obvious visual focus, but partly it’s just that the frame full of middle grays is boring.

Contrast works great again in the photos at Western Sculpture Park (06–15), though: Nice, strong geometric lines in these sculptures really stand out against the various backgrounds, and the relatively high contrast means lighting differences on different faces of the sculptures does a great job of rendering a three-dimensional look in the frame. Shots that depend on color separation rather than purely on geometry for their effect (e.g., 15) are less effective here: the contrast pushes everything towards an end of the spectrum and crushes grays together. (This is also apparent in the shots of trees at the Cathedral of St Paul, a little later on—e.g., 24—which render the growing bits of fruit as pure black.)

The frames from the Cathedral of St Paul look even better than the earlier frames from the Basilica of St Mary: all in all, I like the stonework better here in real life, and I think that the film renders the detail shots beautifully here. The cathedral dome’s dark metal looks wonderful as a clean, dark-medium gray that (again) still preserves a lot of detail on the metalwork (e.g., 17, 27, 28).

The photos of cats at the end of the roll are kind of wonderful—Tristan was so tiny!—but there seems to be some emulsion damage. I’ll have to be especially careful with this film in the future.

All in all, I’m very pleased with this first roll of this film.

photos posted