• 1492: Indian Mounds Park (St. Paul) / back yard at home. (6 May 2025. Rollei IR @ EI 25 in Minolta XE-7.) (on top.)
  • 1490: May Day Parade (Minneapolis, MN). (4 May 2025. Kodak Gold 200 @ EI 200 in Minolta XE-7.)
  • 1489: May Day Parade (Minneapolis, MN) (4 May 2025. Fuji Acros Neopan II @ EI 100 in Minolta XE-7)
  • 1481: George Floyd Square (Minneaplis, MN) / May Day Parade (Minneapolis, MN). (18 April–4 May 2025. Svema FN-64 as Dracula 35 @ EI 64 in Ektar H35 / Minolta XE-7. ) (on bottom.)

Loaded into 1.15L tank inside daylight changing bag. Pre-wet film. During the pre-soak mixed 20mL HC-110 concentrate into distilled water to ~800 mL. Emptied out pre-wetting water and poured developer into the tank, topping off 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 at 20:00 and 40:00. All agitations are all half-agitations, gently (i.e., gently twisting to a 90-degree angle, then gently back).

After 60 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 37 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 1481

Again, it’s disappointing that the film jammed in the Ektar H35; but I’m glad I had a daylight changing bag with me so I could transfer the film and keep shooting it. Svema FN-64 looks great in the Ektar H35 with HC-110 stand development; I think this is a film I’ll shoot in this camera again. There’s a sort of attempt to shoot diptyches here, but it doesn’t work well; it’s hard to figure out in advance which two pictures will be paired together when the processing is done. I think that a basic requirement next time will be choosing horizontal or vertical orientation for the diptych sequence and sticking to that choice through a whole roll, or at least major segments of it. There is some decent work towards executing the idea (e.g., 06, 07), but I don’t know that I’m successfully keeping the overall composition of the two shots in mind adequately in a way that makes them a workable single composition.

The May Day Parade photos on the last two-thirds of the roll are fun, too: I think that the film’s origin as a cinematic film works well here. The contrast is sharp strong enough to distinguish objects well and the fine grain makes for very pretty shots of people and their costumes and the floats in the parade. Much of the last third of the roll is just gorgeous; they make this roll a success on their own.

Decently successful roll, all in all.

Roll 1489

This seems somewhat overdeveloped; I suspect it would pay off to reduce the time in the developer to 50 minutes. Still, they’re usuable with some postprocessing, and the film looks good: when the elements align (always difficult in a parade, with lots of people moving around), the film/dev combination does a good job of showing skin and fabric texture (e.g., 15A) and making people stand out from the background. It’s a nice, bright filmstock that makes light-colored objects (e.g., the bird puppets in 14A and their accompanying white-dressed human in 11A) really pop, and the contrast with the blacktop that’s evidence in most of these shots works well.

Similarly, the dark clothing on some of the musicians in the middle and at the end of the roll turn into a nice middle gray that still stands out from the blacktop and the other background elements; that’s true for some of the elaborate costumes at the end of the roll.

All in all, good pictures here; I’m pleased with them.

Roll 1490

Roll jammed in camera almost immediately. Nothing worth using in the first few shots.

Roll 1492

I wondered whether stand-developing would work for this film, but it seems that it did: these are mostly usable negatives, and the problems with them have to do with faulty winding onto the spool, not with stand development. I wondered whether stand development would erase the distinctions between exposures in a bracketed sequence, but it didn’t, and the distinctions don’t seem substantially different from the exposure differences between items in a bracket in roll 1491. There’s not a whole lot that’s usable here, but that has to do with difficulty focusing for infrared and with the more frequent presence of lens flaring on this roll. All in all, it’s a learning experience, and a decently successful one.