• 1366: Oakland Cemetery tour (St. Paul). (23 May 2023. Rollei Ortho 25 Plus @ EI 25 in Minolta XE-7.)

Another roll with standard agitation schedule.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~15 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed 6mL Rodinal into distilled water to ~200 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 300mL tank and topped off the tank with distilled water. Agitated 40x over the first sixty 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 8.5 minutes. All agitations are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 8.5 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 23 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

What the hell happened here? It’s a mystery. I don’t know where I came up with eight and a half minutes here: it’s well above what the manufacturer recommendations are, and also recommendations from the standard online sources. Maybe I dialed up a recipe for Ilford Ortho Plus? Or Rodinal 1+50? The world may never know.

In any case, the problem isn’t the overdevelopment, which is manageable in scanning (and probably in printing); it’s the uneven development, in which much lighter (darker on the negative) bars run along the top and bottom of every frame. This is more prominently visible in the early (low-numbered) negatives than on the late negatives, but it happens to some extend on every single frame on the roll. Other than that, the negatives sort of look good, despite being both overexposed and overdeveloped; some of them may even be usable, when the bright bars are less prominent and can be cropped effectively.

Big disappointment, though.