• 1363: Calvary Cemetery walking tour. (16 May 2023. CatLABS X Film 320 @ EI 320 in Pentax K-1000.) (on top.)
  • 1392: St Louis, MO: Laumeier Sculpture Park, Side Project Brewing, and Compton Hill Reservoir Park. (15 July 2023. Rollei RPX 100 @ EI 100 in Minolta XE-7.)
  • 1399: Zumbrota & Rochester trip / first hop harvest and brew day, St Paul. (2–10 Sept 2023. Film Ferrania P30 @ EI 80 in Nikon FE-2)
  • 1400: St Paul and drive down Hwy 52 (10–11 Sept 2023. Svema FN64 as FPP Dracula @ EI 64.) (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 8.4 mL HC-110 into ~800mL 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 41 rolls of film fixed in this batch of fixer, 16 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 1363

After the disappointment of roll 1357 (underexposed when shot with a red filter), it’s nice to see a successful development of X Film 320 (using the same development chemicals, dilution, and procedure, too). This is a great film to be shooting in a graveyard, with fine grain, greens turning into a series of middle grays that manage to achieve visual separation between objects, and good textures for stone, brick, moss, and statuary. A net win, all in all.

Tonemapping digital negatives often draws out haloing effects here that are not visible on non-tonemapped versions of the pictures (e.g., 07). But all in all, these shots look great, and there’s plenty of usable photos here. I should be shooting more of this film.

photos posted

Roll 1392

Another really smooth roll of Rollei RPX 100. I really like this film: lots of smooth gray midtones, plenty of shadow detail. Some highlights (e.g, 05–07, 10, ) get blown out here, which is something to be careful of in the future, but damn, this looks really good, all in all.

Grain is really smooth, and there’s lots of distinct grays in the midtones, and the film does a wonderful job of capturing the variations in lighting on (e.g.) the genuinely cylindrical shapes of Alexander Liberman’s The Way. More, sculpture is easily distinguished from a vegetal background when photographed on this film, which is a real boon in a sculpture park. Dynamic range is pretty good, though there are places where I wish for just a little bit more (e.g., 20, which photographs a view of The Way framed by tree branches from inside a shaded area in a grove of trees—though much of the highlight detail is salvaged by tonemapping an HDR digital negative).

There’s a genuinely wonderful look to the well-lit interior shots at Side Project (25–28), too, where the abundant light just suffuses the area, making everything appear to glow&mash;especially when the B/W negs are scanned in color, giving them a warm coffee color.

And it really shows up well in the shots at the Compton Hill park: there’s plenty of stonework, and the fine grain and relatively high contrast really show the details on the stone work and make the geometric compositions pop.

Rolls 1399 and 1400

These were test roll fors the new Nikon. Turns out that the camera’s light meter is off by four stops, so the film is more or less unusable all the way through both rolls. There are a few shots that stand development and careful scanning might recover, and (amusingly) 01 on both rolls was an advancing-the-film-past-the-light-burn shot that, amusingly, happened to be exposed right because the meter wasn’t used at all because there was no compositional intent, but both rolls are a loss. Looking forward to the next roll to go through the camera when it comes back from the repair shop, though.