Two more rolls, with standard agitation schedule. Rolls 1381, 1384, 1385, and 1398 are being fixed and rinsed at the same time as these tolls are being agitated.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~90 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed 16mL HC-110 concentrate into distilled water to ~400 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 500mL tank and topped off the tank with distilled water. Agitated 15x over the first thirty seconds or so, knocked on the tank several times to dislodge bubbles, and then agitated 5x every 30 seconds to a total development time of twelve minutes. All agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 12 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed 5x/10x/20x in 68-degree tap water. Fixed in fixer 1+4 for 6 minutes, inverting 10x over 15 seconds at the top of every minute. (That’s now 20 rolls 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 1330

DP31 in HC-110 1+31 has an interesting look. It’s dark and murky, kind of dreamy at times. There are plenty of places where the photos are underexposed and the exposure latitude is too low: there’s just not enough information in the negative to get anything useful out of 05 or 24, for instance. But some of the photos of the cathedral (e.g., 02, 03, 07) are both ethereal and menacing. There’s a feeling of real weight to a lot of the shots, especially those featuring a substantial amount of metal (04, 18–20, 22, 23) or brick (09, 27–29). And when properly exposed, there’s plenty of contrast resulting from contrasty visual elements in the subject matter (e.g., 06, 18–20).

Vegetation is, on the whole, quite murky-looking. Sometimes this is effective because it helps the vegetation to drop into an also-dark background (e.g., 09, 28); sometimes it doesn’t work, because the vegetation should be part of the subject (e.g., 16, 27).

The emulsion is quite fragile and easy to damage, which makes for a bad combination with a very curly base. Some shots that would be great are moderately to severely marred by scratching or pitting (e.g., 22, 23).

It was a fun roll to shoot, and it might be a film stock I use again in the future under specific circumstances, but I don’t think I’ll have it in my regular rotation: it’s too much trouble and not versatile enough.

photos posted

Roll 1377

More Brass Messengers at the beginning of the roll; same comments apply as with roll 1375. They’re a fun band to shoot.

Puppeteer Enormous Face was harder to shoot, partly because of the angle and partly because the visual aspect of the puppet show was really only a relatively small part of the show, which was heavily audio-focused; and what was visual included an awful lot of motion as a privary component of the conveyance of meaning. But there are some cool shots here anyway, especially of the hypnotic umbrella.

At the end of looking through this group of five rolls of three different (groups of) artists shot during this night, I still think that my preference is for Delta 3200 in Rodinal to TMax P3200 in HC-110. Nice to know that the slightly cheaper fast film in the cheaper developer also looks better.

photos posted