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 (one-liter) 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, 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 35 rolls of film fixed in this batch of fixer, 10 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 1347

There are some kind of pretty shots of the Mississippi in snow at the beginning of the roll (01–07), but nothing genuinely amazing. Many of those shots border on being overexposed.

But the shots from LARK Toys are just gorgeous, and working with the (mostly) natural light inside the rather dark portions of the store worked well, I think. The low grain and sharp contrast really worked well on the photos of the carousel animals: 09 in particular is gorgeous. So is the photo of the fake skeleton playing the organ (11), although the tricky lighting left that relatively overexposed.

The murals in Denver (most of 16–33) look fucking gorgeous on this film. NP100 in an HC-110 semi-stand really seems like a winning combination, which means it will probably work well for UN54, too. The textures are preserved and there’s nice separation between tones in the original image, and the murals wind up reducing down to monochrome quite effectively here while still being easy to parse visually. 17, 22, 23, 26, 27, and 32 are particular favorites of the mural photos for me, here; I really like the geometry in 29 and 34, for the non-mural photos.

The end of the roll, with the Dushambe teahouse, is pretty but nothing special. It’s the murals that are the real winner on this roll.

I’m definitely going to be stand-developing more UN54/NP100 in HC-110, too.

photos posted

Roll 1355

First time shooting with this camera. Something unfortunate: the date-imprinting function seems to be turned on, and it seems impossible to to turn off. Even worse: it’s not just imprinting the date; every segment in each of all six digits for the LCD-style numbers seems permanently turned on for each photo. That’s a real downside. Worse yet: I’ve already shot a half-dozen or so other rolls of film with this camera and I’m just now developing the first. Which will teach me to be an optimist about a new camera when the first test roll hasn’t been developed and scanned, I guess. Though at least the date impression is in a corner, and could be cropped or airbrushed out at least some of the time.

Aside from that, the camera has great focus and takes nice, crisp picture; the Fomapan 400 looks great once again in HC-110. As with many point-and-=shoots, there being no manual control over exposure means the camera simply produces blurry photos when the light is too low, because the camera reduces the shutter speed to get the exposure. The fact that the largest aperture ranges from f/3.6 to f/10.6 (!) at maximum zoom really doesn’t help, either.

Roll 1360

Ah, Fomapan, the old standard. Makes me feel better about my decision to shoot roll 1359 at box speed:I’m not crazy! Fomapan 400 has the same box speed and look how it turned out! This is only the second roll of Fompan I’ve stand-developed in HC-110, but I’m pleased with the results: images are rendered beautifully; dynamic range is condensed, as you’d expect from semi-stand development; there are no problems with sprocket surge of halo effects or anything else. There is, however, an intermittent problem with water spotting, and I think I’m just going to have to start forcing myself to develop and rinse in distilled water: St Paul raising the pH to avoid leeching lead ions just contributes too much dissolved mineral crap to the water to let me get away with only using tap water.

Some of the mineral scale looks fixable with airbrushing, though, and it’s not on every frame; and there are some really nice shots of MiA’s collection here. Sculpture in particular really has its moments (14, 18), which tends to be what I get good shots of at MiA, I guess. The shots of Ganymede and the Eagle (22–32) and of the three Graces (34–44) are really the high point of the roll, but the Indian from the plains collection (56) is also quite good.

There are a few worthwhile rural landscapes at the end of the roll, too.

Roll 1367

Well. Nice to know that not very roll from Oakland Cemetery that day was a failed experiment. This roll looks pretty good, all in all. The moderately high contrast and the sharp edges with relatively fine grain really do give it a filmic kind of look.

I’m not sure how much this works for cemeteries, though. Yes, there are shots that work well: notably, those that foreground (conceptually and visually, if not spatially) stone work, of which there is of course quite a bit in Oakland Cemetery. Good examples of this include 00A to 03A and 05A, at the very beginning of the roll, which are basically just pictures of monuments, in whole or part. Other good monument shots include 11A, which has really great texture; 13A; 17A, where the vegetation going dark really shows off the lichens growing on the stone;

But metal bits of monuments often don’t work well: 04A has a weather-tarnished metal plate (iron, maybe) that’s gone too dark because of the high contrast. And vegetation all fades the background: well and good, if you’re trying to emphasize other foreground subjects, but this film is worse than most for vegetation-forward pictures, as with the tree bark in 06A, 16A, and (not quite as bad) 20A. It doesn’t always do any favors for human skin, either: that man in 07A really wasn’t all that tan. There are also places where the bright stone of monuments gets pushed too far up the film’s response curve and blows out the details, as in 12A and 14A.

All in all, good roll.