• 1416: Electric Six at the Turf Club. (25 October 2023. Ilford Delta 3200 @ EI 3200.) (On top.)
  • 1415: Electric Six at the Turf Club, St. Paul. (25 October 2023. Ilford Delta 3200 @ EI 3200.)
  • 1389: Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade at the Palace Theater. (3 July 2023. Ilford Delta 3200 @ EI 3200.)
  • 1361: Lake Street and Hiawatha Ave (MPLS) / front yard plants at home (St Paul). (2 May 2023. Film Washi S @ EI 50, Minolta XE-7.) (On bottom.)

Four more rolls, with standard agitation schedule. The three Delta 3200 rolls were all exposed at 3200 at concerts, whereas the Washi roll is shots from around St Paul. Neither has done well in the past with any stand-development procedure I’ve tried. Rolls 1381, 1384, 1385, and 1398 are stand-developing at the same time as these rolls are being agitated.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~30 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed 44.5mL Rodinal into distilled water to ~900 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 1.15L 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 eleven minutes. All agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 11 minutes, disposed of developer, then 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 18 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 1361

Nice to finally get good results out of one of the Washi speciality films! I’m super-happy with some of these shots.

Film is in fact ery high contrast, and it looks pretty good for some of these industrial cityscapes: 02 to 04 are probably my favorite shots yet of the signage at American Rug Laundry, especially with the dark, contrasty brick in the background; and the half a roll’s worth of shots at the Acme Foundry (05–19) are gorgeous: . The backlit shots incorporating much sky don’t work as well, as the foreground tends to fall straight into deep shadow and drop straight into a flat geometric pattern (05, 06; and 07 exhibits the same basic “no shadow detail” problem without having an meaningful portion of sky in the photo). But well-lit shots (08, e.g.) have nice highlight detail while retaining enough detail in the shadows to keep them from being pure geometric patterns of black.

Tonemapping two-pass negatives restores some shadow detail (e.g., 09). But all in all, the high contrast works really well to emphasize the patterns that tend to be part of artificial construction (shadows and power lines in 11, brickework in 12 and many others, train tracks and road sign in 24, etc.). Brickwork in general looks wonderful on this film: 15–17 and 20 are beautifully textured, and the contrasting brick colors on 14 are visually striking on film even though they’re much less striking in real life. The little bits of graffiti shows (e.g., 23) look great on this film, and I wish I’d paid more attention to graffiti while shooting. Ah well, I still have some Washi S floating around.

The photos of the crabapple tree in the front yard (27–31) are a disappointment: too dark, and the sky is the only thing that’s illuminated well enough to be in the brighter register. But there’s some nice dreamy pictures of the dogwood leaves at the end of the roll, where the background fades quite effectively into the background and the patterns on the leaves really show with the high contrast. 33 and 35 are particularly good.

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

Roll 1389

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.

Roll 1415

Thinner negs than some of the other rolls shot during this concert, but there’s still usable material here. All in all, though, I wish it had been a roll of Kodak P3200, in which case I would have gotten more usable shots, I think.

Still, development is basically solid and so was the exposure.

Roll 1416

Same as the last roll—thinner negs here than for the first two rolls, and I’m less lucky on timing and composition, but some shots are still usable. Again, I’d rather these were P3200 like roll 1414, which is the best roll of the night.