Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film in tap water for ~50 minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 9 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 (to ~1L). 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 half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 60 minutes, disposed of developer, rinsed in 68-degree tap water, filling the tank three times and agitating 5x, 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 27 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 1382

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 1395

And here I was just carping about how roll 1394 was the only roll of film I took at the River Circus, forgetting that that is not quite true: there are nine shots from the River Circus at the beginning of this roll. What a contrast they are, too—not in the sense of photographic contrast on the image; 1394 has the lock on that, being a roll of very high-contrast film. What a perceptual contrast they are, is what I mean. Seeing crowd shots (the main subject of these nine photos) that have skin-range mid-tones on this roll really drives how just how contrasty Film Washi S is and how little suited it generally is to portraits or other human-focused shots. These are rather gorgeous, especially when the focus on a small number of people (04, 05, 07, 11) instead of on the crowd as a whole really drives home how important mid-range skin tones are, all in all. The biggest problem with this part of the roll is that it’s easy to overexpose the sand, though that’s relatively minor, since the people are exposed correctly, and the sand can be pulled back in during postprocessing.

The photos of the Lottie Cooper are great, too: they really show off how great FP4+ is at capturing texture and the film’s even response curve. Why am I not shooting more FP4+? The wood grain looks great, the nails are visually distinguished from the dark wood, the cloudy sky is still within the film’s dynamic range, and everything is beautiful. There are places where it feels slightly overdeveloped, and I wonder if pulling back the development time on future rolls a litle might be helpful. But 13, 14, 18, and 20 are all particularly beautiful pictures; and 21, 22, and 24 are particularly great examples of the odd texture of the salt-cured ship wood.

The late shots at the end of the roll (31 and later), showing Lake Michigan and the pier, also look wonderful. Great textures again, mostly with rock instead of wood; the sky is within dynamic range, though that would be more true on non-tonemapped scans if the roll weren’t slightly overdeveloped; and there are some really nice compositions here (32 in particular stands out to me, though I also quite like 37).

Roll 1404

Damn, this looks really pretty. Another notch in the belt for Adox CHS 100 II—vegetation at Descanso Gardens looks great, for instance: the leaves in 05 are crisp and the fine grain really accentuates their texture, and 08 is a really gorgeous picture of a flower with, again, beautiful textures. It’s an easy film to overexpose, though: much of the cactus in 9–13 is blown out, and though tonemapping digital negatives pulls it back into range, it’s still not fully satisfactory because much of the contrast is lost. Vegetation is also blown out in ways that can’t be fully recovered in 13–15, even though those aren’t cactus.

A lot of the roadside pictures in the second half of the roll are just gorgeous, though. The trees along Highway 126 (17) and the Church of Christ in Fillmore (19) are both really nice shots, their lack of an even horizon notwithstanding. And some of the trees-on-hillside photos in the 24–27 range are definitely landscape shots that really could only be taken in California, I think. (I’m particularly happy with 24 &damp; 25.)

I want to shoot more of this film.

Roll 1417

Damn, this roll looks good. Ferrania P30 was a great choice for this shooting situation: it turns the gloomy day into atomospheric renderings of the lighthouse and the coastline. I’m really happy with this roll.

In retrospect, though, I wish I’d used a red or orange filter to darken the sky, which sure is blown out in a lot of photos here. Tonemapping the digital negatives brings some sky detail back in, and also helps with the figures of people, who tend to be rendered in too much contrast—look at how the photographer’s black jacket in 03 recovers detail and stops being just an inkblot, for instance. Exposure was also relatively tricky on this roll: the sky was so uniformly white that it tricked the Pentax’s light meter, and foreground subjects are relatively underexposed in 04, 05, etc.

Shots of the forested coastline look really good here, too: dark and broody, but enough shadow detail to see individual trees and features on the coastal beaches. The high contrast often washes out the water, but (again) tonemapping high-density scans pulls detail back in. Many shots (e.g., 09, 11, 12) have real differences in what’s visible in the two different scans: tree detail in the non-tonemapped version, and lake and sky detail in the tonemapped; I suspect that layering these is going to be necessary to bring out both.

The lighthouse itself also looks great in these photos: there’s plenty of detail on the brick- and stonework, and the fine grain really allows the details to shine.

photos posted