• 1423: Kinda Fonda Wanda @ 11 Wells Spirits. (26 Jan 2024. Kodak TMax P3200 @ EI 3200 in Minolta XE-7.) (On top.)
  • 1422: J-Mo on the Beat and Kinda Fonda Wanda @ 11 Wells Spirits. (26 Jan 2024. Kodak TMax P3200 @ EI 3200 in Minolta XE-7.)
  • 1418: Split Rock Lighthouse & environs / Twin Harbors area / Minneapolis and St Louis Park from car. (10? Nov 2023–13 Jan 2024. Kodak TMax P3200 @ EI 800 in ???.)
  • 1414: the Surfrajettes and Electric Six at the Turf Club / Seward district, Minneapolis. (25 Oct 2023. Kodak TMax P3200 @ EI 3200 in Pentax K-1000.) (On bottom.)

Four more rolls with standard agitation schedule.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film for ~90 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed ~31.5mL HC-110 concentrate into distilled water to ~900 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 1L 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 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 35 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 1414

Basically successful roll, especially given (a) the basic rules of concert shooting, and (b) the fact that the Turf Club is darker and more crowded than most places I’ve shot, and (c) the fact that I was often shooting while holding the camera over my head.

This came out better, I think, than roll 1413, shot at the same time and in the same conditions; as I was saying before, I think I prefer TMax P3200 in HC-110 to Delta 3200 in Rodinal. Comparisons of the shots of the Surfrajettes, in particular, show that the results are much better on this rull than on the previous one: 07 is a great shot of the drummer, and 11 shows most of the band very clearly, and neither has any comparable shot on the previous roll.

The shots on this roll from Electric Six were not quite as good; the lighting was different, and harsher. So the contrast is more prominent in the second ~half of the roll, but I think that there are places where it works well; there’s something atmospheric about the harsh contrast and the bright light and the dark background. It really does look like club photography from the 70s or 80s in a lot of ways, which is no bad thing. There’s not a lot usable on this half of the roll, and if what is usable isn’t gold, it’s at least silver.

In the final analysis, I’m happy with these shots.

photos posted

Roll 1418

Roll works rather well, but in retrospect, I wish I’d pushed HP5+ to 1600 or 3200 instead of using TMax P3200 here: what I wanted was detail on the lighthouse when it got darker, and I think pushing HP5+ while stand-developing would have both had less grain and more detail than pushing the TMax here.

But the grain is rather effective in some ways here: it works decently well with the brickwork of the lighhouse (01), for instance, and shows more detail than the Ferrania P30 on the previous roll. Though it also shows more shadow detail than the P30 on landscape shots of the coast, though, it has so much grain as to largely render these shots unusable, with only a few exceptions (06, maybe). And, while the tonemapped results of deeper-bit-depth images do in fact help to reduce the grain somewhat, they also tend to show off halation at a level I’m surprised to see on a roll that wasn’t stand-developed (see 08, e.g.).

The shots of the light in the lighthouse (10–21) don’t show as much detail on the lighthouse lamp as I’d like, which is what I was mostly talking about earlier when I said I wish I’d shot HP5+ or Kentmere 400.

Again, many shots in the second half of the roll are marred by grain: most of the shots of trees in 22–25 have too much grain to show off the texture of the bark, which was a big chunk of what I was shooting for. Similarly, in the shots of the processing plant (26–27), the choice is between a tonemapped rendering whose primary noticeable feature is grain, or a non-tonemapped rendering where the sky, clouds, and billowing steam are all blown out.

Grain is also the primary feature of the end of the roll, in the western-TC-suburbs shots I took to use up the last of the film.

photos posted

Rolls 1422 and 1423

Both rolls look pretty good, and I think I’ve found my standard development methodology for TMax P3200 at EI 3200. That said, I still wish I’d shot a roll of Kentmere 400 and tried to push it two stops for comparative purposes. (roll 1424 is a whole other bag of worms and not useful for a comparison.) But it got me the sufficiently fast shutter speed and wide aperture that I needed, and it’s worth observing that (a) closing down the aperture was unnecessary and just resulted in moderately underexposed photos; and (b) slowing down the shutter speed past 1/60 or 1/125 is also unnecessary and just resulted in blur. Having the lens (close to) wide open and shooting at 1/60 or 1/125 resulted in the best photos from these rolls.

Kinda Fonda Wanda was once again a lot of fun to shoot, and so was opening singer J-Mo on the Beat. I’m not sure that I was as successful with crowd shots during the show, but line dancing is suprisingly hard to capture with a 50mm lens while I’m lazily sitting at a table, and I’m not familiar enough with it that I can anticipate what original actors are likely to do.

But there are some good shots of a fun band and a fun opening singer. I’m relatively happy with these rolls.