• 1383: Eels at First Avenue. (20 June 2023. Film Washi Z @ EI 400 in Konica Z-Up 110.) (on top.)
  • 1368: Elko Traders’ Market / Victoria St, near I-35E offramp (St Paul) / Mt Zion Cemetery tour (28 May–6 June 2023. Wolfen NP100 @ EI 100 in Minolta XE-7.)
  • 1378: Twin Cities. (26 June 2023. Wolfen UN 54 @ EI 100 in Nikon FE-2.)
  • 1373: Jason Webley at the Ivy Arts Building. (17 June 2023. Derev Pan 400 @ EI 400 in Minolta XE-7.) (on bottom.)

Still catching up on my film backlog! Still have plenty to do.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~30 minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 8.5 mL HC-110 into ~400mL tap water. Poured developer in to the four-roll tank and topped off the tank with tap water. Agitated 40x over the first thirty 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, filling the tank three times and agitating 5x, 10x, and 20x respectively, before pouring out 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 31 rolls of film fixed in this batch of fixer, 6 since replenishment.) 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 1368

All in all, really nice-looking roll. Orwo UN54 looks good, so it’s no surprise that UN54 + anti-halation layer, which is what NP100 is, also looks good. It’s a little crisper than UN54, no surprise; and stand-developing it in HC-110 instead of Rodinal really seems to decrease the grain. As is often the case, the full-color scans that don’t go through tonemapping look more pleasing than the tonemapped .dng files; I’m increasingly convinced that this is partly because stand developing already compresses the dynamic range, and compressing it further leaves the images looking too flat. (Compare, for instance, the two renderings of frame 06.)

Metal textures are great here (e.g., 13, 17, most of 21–32); so are wood textures, which show the wood grain quite nicely (10).

All in all, a very satisfying roll.

photos posted

Roll 1373

Really beautiful roll, especially right at the beginning. Gorgeous solid dark midtones and shadows. It’s really fine-grained and the texture of brick and metal is really beautiful. Geometric lines (e.g., 04). It’s a good film, too, for a human subject: skin tones are clean, hair is separated from both background and skin. The fly in the ointment is that the film is hard to work with physically: emulsion is easy to scratch, and the film base is so thin that it’s hard to roll onto a developing reel.

It is also not quite fast enough for the lighting conditions in the second half of the roll. It would have been wise to overdevelop to compensate.

Roll 1378

Well, it’s a veritable catalog of what can go wrong with a roll of film. It’s amazing to see so many different problems together. Impressive in its own way, in fact.

For one thing, the roll is badly underexposed. This is the first roll shot with the new Nikon, whose light meter is, it later turns out, off by four stops! The roll was also badly wound onto the rell, and is quite scratched, and shows lots and lots of mineral spotting.

Quite a loss, all in all.

Roll 1383

My intent on getting this little point-and-shoot was that it would be easier to get a non-SLR into concerts. This turns out to be true, but this little Konica, general photo quality notwithstanding (see roll 1355), just doesn’t do well in concert lighting. Not having manual control over shutter speed is a deal-breaker here.

Nothing usable on this roll.