• 1421: Nicollet Ave. Lustron houses / Robert St. Bridge (St Paul) / Late St (Minnepaolis) / J-Mo on the Beat. (14–26 Jan 2024. Rollei RPX 100 @ EI 100 in Minolta XE-7.) (on top.)
  • 1420: near Hiawatha Ave, Minneapolis / cats at home / Robert St Bridge, St Paul / Lake Ave, Minneapolis. (10–16 Jan 2024. Rollei RPX 100 @ EI 100 in Olympus XA-1.)
  • 1419: near Hiawatha Ave, Minneapolis. (10 Jan 2024. Fomapan 100 @ EI 100 in Olympus XA-1.) (on bottom.)

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film in tap water for ~15 minutes. During the pre-soak, mixed 9.6 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 20?x over the first sixty seconds or so, knocked on the tank several times to dislodge bubbles, and let it sit for one hour. Gave five additional agitations at 20:00 and 40:00. 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 31 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 1419

Short roll, because this is a test roll to verify that my father’s old Olympus XA-1, which he gave me in September, is still working. It is! And I quite like having a wide-angle point-and-shoot; I have no complaints about exposure and think that stand-development for rolls shot with this camera will probably help to make up for lack of exposure control.

The 02–03 pair lets me know that focus is fuzzy close to the camera: take a look at the lettering on the side of the building. It’s legible, but definitely not really in focus, so … landscape shots it is, here. But the railway tracks off of Hiawatha Ave. (which is most of the roll) really look great: the wide-angle (well, 35mm is the focal length) really accentuates the tracks when they’re shot diagonally across the frame, as in 04 or 10, of if they recede diagonally into the distance, as in 05 or 09.

The film/dev combination here also works great, especially given the lack of exposure control. Lack of shutter-speed control makes it hard to render falling snow, though.

Graffiti on these frames is nice and punchy, sometimes more graphic art than smooth-tone photography (10, 14, etc.). And the grain silos are imposing.

Nice roll, glad to be shooting with this camera.

photos posted

Roll 1420

Loving this Rollei RPX 100, which also works well in the Olympus XA-1. I’m going to have to try the 400 speed sometime soon. This is a nice, dramatic, punchy film, with medium contrast and really solid-feeling shadows. The relatively high contrast really makes things like factories and foundries (03, 04, 09) and railroad rails (03) stand out in the snow; graffiti really looks great, too, even if it’s not the focus of the shot (03). As with the last roll, falling snow doesn’t render well in this camera because the shutter speed is too slow to render it as anything other than a smear, but this occasionally turns out to good effect (e.g., 08, 11).

The interior shots in the middle of the roll (12–18) are a pretty good demonstration that (a) no, I can’t easily get enough light into the room to make indoor photography easily possible with this film on this camera, and (b) damn, no, the camera will not bring anything that close into focus. But the one photo of Esmerelda on the bed (17) is a real winner, these things notwithstanding.

Lots of shots in the second half of the roll (19+) are overexposed; there’s really not much more that can be done here, except try to anticipate and pull the film back a bit during development, I suppose. It certainly was a bright, sunny day. But even without shorting development time, stand-development helped to compensate for it, and tonemapping the deep negatives brought back plenty of detail. (And some of these shots are also underexposed: 25, 26. Again, without exposure control, there’s little that can be done about that.) There’s some nice detail in the highlights here, both in the sky and on the metal and concrete structures visible.

Roll 1421

Nice diverse roll in terms of subject matter; most of it came out gorgeous. Another victory for Rollei RPX 100, I guess.

No real notes here. Most photos are usable, though there’s maybe an argument to be made for pulling back the development time a little bit: some of the snow near the Robert St Bridge is blown out a bit.

Film is just not sensitive enough to get good results from an indoor, poorly lit concert venue, as at the end of the roll, though.