Back to film again

I've been having one of my many returns to taking photos with film again recently, I was tidying up in the Box Room of Doom and got my old Rolleiflex and Bronica ETRSi out.

I also dug out a stock of Ilford FP4+ that went out of date a couple of years ago. It's been in a cold room since I bought it and I didn't worry about it being anything but good.

The key catalyst was a blog post by JB Hildebrand on Stand Development. The main drawback, for me, in shooting film was the problem of development, it's getting harder to find good film labs and I'm too lazy to develop my own films, all the timing and temperature just left me irritated. Stand developing takes a lot of that out. Hildebrand's post is a great resource and I urge you to read it but the essence of this technique is to use just enough developer to run the film and no more (this is typically a 1:100 dilution) and leave it pretty much alone for an hour or so then wash and fix. I used Adox Adonal (the new name for Rodinal after AGFA went under) and Ilford Rapid Fixer at 1:4 for five minutes.

Simple. I like simple.

My process is a little individual (this is the other key feature of Stand Devving, everyone does it their own way) and I left the first film in for two hours with inversions at every 30 minutes, this makes it a semi-stand dev but who's counting?

The shots I took with the Rolleiflex have come out pretty well, at least as well as the last roll I took ages getting to exactly 25 degrees and agitating perfectly on time and all that stressful palaver.

The shots aren't the sharpest and I was using the Sunny 16 Rule for metering but things came out reasonably well for a test shot in a very suspect 75 year old camera.

 

My old-timey Rolleiflex

And, for comparison, here is an older shot (of a now defunct eyesore) taken with this camera but developed at a proper lab. It's on Kodak Tri-X 400 rather than FP4+ but it was scanned on the same scanner - Epson V700 - which I'll talk about in another post.

The horrible St Nicholas House.

You can have a look at it in my Flickr Stream

So, here are a couple of shots from the latest roll, along Guild Street near Aberdeen Station.

Tivoli Theatre

Station Hotel

Corner of Guild Street

All up I am happy with the results. I think my scanning needs to improve and I will definitely be pushing the next shots, that is one of the great advantages of this technique and one I should really have been using all along. It also allows for pushing and standard exposure of the same roll with no change in development. Film is becoming digital.