Three more rolls, all Film Washi S, since roll 1361 was finally an acceptable result for this film.

Loaded inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film in tap water for ~40 minutes. During the pre-soak mixed 39mL Rodinal into distilled water to one liter. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer in to the 1.15L tank. Agitated 15x 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 eleven minutes. All agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 11 minutes, disposed of developer, then 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 44 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 1369

Really pleased to be getting some good results with Washi S, finally. It’s a weird and enjoyable film to shoot, and oh boy is it contrasty. Really, really fine-grained, too. Interesting.

The first shot on the roll (01, of course) really does show the film in a nutshell: all the vegetation has gone visible dark, the grass slightly less so than the trees; the stone on the monuments is bright white, and the monument in front, which is what was metered, shows some texture detail, while some of the ones in the background are more or less completely blown out; the moss on the monuments, which is of course also vegetation and quite dark, provides a good amount of the detail that the picture has in the first place. It’s kind of a beautiful shot, but I think it would have worked even better with a lower-contrast film stock. Tonemapping a digital negative restores some detail, but not a whole lot. This is often true on this roll: tonemapping serves not just to restore detail, but to pull back the highlights, which is were detail tends to be almost lost and hard to see without that tonemapping operation. (02 is also a great example of this.)

But keeping the highlights from getting blown out is difficult here (15, 16, 17, 19, 24); it’s the shadows that are keeping their detail. When the surfaces have enough detail, though, texture is beautiful, and this doesn’t just apply to stone; the leaves in 18 and 20 are rich and solid-looking.

photos posted

Roll 1394

I don’t know what led me to shoot only one roll of film at the River Circus, and I don’t know what possessed me to make that roll a roll of very high-contrast film, but that worked out poorly. The venue was shaded, and so almost everything falls into the film’s “shadow” range. Yes, I could have gotten away with shooting a different roll of ISO 50 film, if that film had had a standard response curve; but having a bimodal distribution on the brightness histogram for a standard shot on this film means that almost everything in a shaded area falls a lot closer to the lower hump than the brighter one. Not a lot of usable shots here. There are a few usable shots in the range of 19–26, where a beam of light from the setting sun breaks through the treetops on the opposite bank and illuminates part of what’s going on, that are kind of cool; but the roll as a whole is basically a loss.

Would have been great to get here earlier and get a better spot, too.

Chalk this up to being a learning experience about very high-contrast film.

Roll 1407

There are some pleasing shots on this roll. There are also some shots on this roll where the contrast is way too high, or the development is (still, sigh) uneven (e.g., the dark spots in the sky on 07 and, even more, 11 and 13), or where the tight-curled film was hard to handle in the dark and I wound up putting a big fingerprint on part of the frame (e.g., 08 and 18) or scratching on the emulsion (15). The contrast is too high for anything that’s backlit (the pillars on 09 and 10, for instance, or the sculptures in 16 and 24).

But there are places where the high contrast works quite well, expecially with the fine grain: the star-shaped sculpture in 03 and the detailed texture in the baked dirt; the silhouettes of the pipe work in 04; the vignetting around the dried pond, and the cracked dirt beneath it, on 05 and 06; the bicycle and the pyramid, on 23; to pick just a few.

All in all, a moderately successful roll.