Still catching up on my film backlog! Still have plenty to do. Ten rolls tonight helps, but it’ll be the last night I develop until I pick up some more distilled water.

Mixed up a new batch of fixer: ~200mL (all that was remaining) from the Ilford Rapid Fixer, then topped off to 300mL total from the new bottle of Arista Odorless Fixer, plus 1200mL of distilled water.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~30 minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 8.3 mL HC-110 into ~800mL distilled water. Poured developer in to the four-roll (one-liter) tank and topped off the tank with distilled 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 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 10x, 10x, and 20x respectively, before pouring out water. Fixed in fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes, inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. (That’s now 4 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 distilled water and agitated 20x, and hung negatives vertically to dry.

Evaluation and notes

Roll 1371

Ferrania P30 mostly looks good in HC-110 stand. It’s often hard to keep both the foreground and the sky properly exposed (e.g., 08A, 11A, 19A, 20A). Some of the tonemapped scans (e.g., 19A, 25A) make the photos look unevenly developed: I think that there’s not enough total developer in this batch; we’re talking about ~2mL HC-110 concentrate per roll, so that’s not surprising, I guess.

It’s the shots from Raspberry Island where the roll really shines, I think. There’s some nice use of framing in a lot of these shots (27A, 31A, 34A), and the composition in general is, I think, some of the better work I did last year. Ferrania P30 is snappy and crisp, but still gives concrete and brick a nice feeling of solidity and a very prominent texture without having a lot of grain in the frame.

All in all, a very pleasant roll.

photos posted

Roll 1393

All in all, I like the look of this roll. Having just looked at several rolls of fine-grained ISO 100 film, this has more visible grain in the shots, but really it’s well within acceptable range for the film’s ISO, and is even pleasant, reminding me that this is, after all, film.

It works well for the subject matter for these shots, too: the grain highlights the metallic and concrete textures in the sculpture at the Compton reservoir (01, 03), and there’s a nice range of shadow tones on the dark metal, which helps the details in the sculpture to be visible (03).

Water and vegetation are less vibrant than I’d hoped, though (02). Luckily there’s not much of that on this roll. There’s much more stone and concrete, which really works well: the grain highlights texture and repeating patterns, and the park’s central tower (04–09) really looks glorious here. Other concrete and brick structures in St Louis, later, in the middle of the roll (12–16), also look great, for the same reasons. The stone, metal, and brick in the second half of the roll, in St. Paul, look great, for the same reasons. (e.g., 21, 25, 36, and especially 34, where the contrast really makes the composition pop).

There’s just enough exposure latitude, too, to really take advantage of shadows; 11 does a great job, I like to think, of framing the central composition from inside the small structure with its unusually shaped doorway. Tonemapping the two-pass negative here completely ruins the effect by making the interior of the structure much more visible.

It also makes glass look great, and there’s a fair amount of that in the second half of the roll (e.g., 17, 20, 21, 23, etc.). Glass here tends to render as a relatively dark surface—no surprise, as it’s downtown office glass, often shaded or polarized or otherwise intended to keep from being purely transparent, but not all films make it look this way.

What doesn’t work well in the second half of the roll is shots of stonework detail in shadow; there’s just not enough texture to make the shots genuinely satisfying. For this reason, the panorama in 28–31 is just not worth stitching.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with this roll.

photos posted

Roll 1397

Not a bad roll of PanF+—developing quickly seems to have avoided some of the problems I’ve had with the film in the past—but it’s just not fast enough for some of what it was called on to do in this roll: the shaded sculptures in the woodland grove were sometimes too underexposed to get good results from (e.g., 03 and 04 are underexposed, and stand development didn’t help; on 05, there’s too much contrast, and stand-development didn’t compress the dynamic range enough to keep the highlights from being blown out or the shadows from being too dark). Similarly, it’s also too dark to reliably get good results in the indoor sculpture museum: 19 is underexposed, as are much of 22–26, and 20 really shows off lens vignetting.

There are some rather beautiful shots along the way: 29, 31, 32 stand out from the later section. And some of the others will be usable with some lighting postprocessing. But PanF+ was not the right choice for either situation, although I’ll give myself a pass on the second, since I didn’t know how much of the roll I was going to use at the first place.

Roll 1402

Moderately successful roll: PanF+ winds up being slower than I’d like, and though developing sooner rather than later helps fix the latent image, there’s still plenty that’s muddy and dim here. The sharply defined geological shapes against the sky have rather heavy haloing in places, and I think that more agitation would likely help with this—or else non-stand development.

Still, there are places where PanF+ stand in HC-110 works quite well: 04–07 show really fine geological detail, and the vegetation in the photos from 07–10 really recedes effectively from the geological features. Using the vegetation as a frame was a good decision here, I think, and it paid off well. The landscapes in the middle of the roll (14–20) basically work well: the hay bales are visually separate from the grass and from the large geological feature in the background. I wish I’d managed to get more contrast in these, but I think that that’s something that I’m likely to be able to bump up in postprocessing without much in the eay of ill effects.

The last two-fifths or so of the roll are a loss: it was too dark and I was shooting aimlessly out the window of the moving car at sunset. There are a few interesting silhouettes (e.g., 31), though.

All in all, a decent roll, but I wish I’d been shooting FP4+ instead.

photos posted