• 1403: road from SLC to LA / Descanso Gardens. (17–19 Sept 2023. Film Washi F @ EI 100 in Pentax K-1000.)

One more roll. I’ve had bad luck with Washi F so far, so I’m trying another developer/concentration rating.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~135 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed ~19mL HC-110 concentrate into distilled water to ~250 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 300mL one-roll tank and topped off the tank with distilled water. Agitated 20x 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 five minutes. All agitations are half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After five 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 39 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

Better than previous rolls of Washi F: there are some attractive and usable shots. On the other hand, this roll is hardly a resouding success, either: light piping has still the first third of the film unusable, and it was loaded in rather deep shade. I suspect that avoiding light piping with this film is going to turn out to mean “load in complete darkness.”

Some of the shots from Descanso Gardens in the second half of the roll, though, are really quite something: 11 is strange and beautiful, really showing off the orthochromatic nature of the film and, I suppose, its X-ray sensitivity. But many shots are only usable after very intense modifications to the gray midpoint: dragging the gamma from 1.0 to 0.25 was necessary for multiple shots, which is a really huge alteration! (Compare the straight scan of frame 12 to the tonemap of the .dng file for an example: the .dng tonemap was postprocessed by hand, the straight scan was not, and the highlights, i.e. the flower petals, are completely blown out, and the diffusion effect is very prominent. Similar comments apply to 13 and 14.)

Some things came out well, and I’m glad for that. Best I could hope for, I suppose.