405 words on Black and White
After many weeks of photographic hiatus, I finally developed some films again today. In fact this ‘hiatus’ wasn’t really one. Just the fact that I used three cameras with three different films – ADOX CHS100, ADOX CHS25 and Agfa APX400 – meant that it took quite a while to actually finish a film. Particularly as I keep moving in the environment that is Göttingen which looks quite boring to me.
But hooray, now the films were full and I could ‘enjoy’ sitting there and developing all three of them. Which, as usual, ended up being a bit tedious. I used the ATM49 developer once more which I really liked so far – and which I fear might go off if kept it much longer anyway and I hope to get some scans of the negatives this week to get a better impression of how thing worked out.
A first look through the negatives suggests that the CHS100 must have gotten a little light in the cassette which did feel somewhat unstable when took the film out of the camera. I had the impression that the cassettes of the ADOX films are not particularly stable before and this impression appears to have been a correct one. While the damage caused by this only affects a few of the negatives, it is a bit annoying.
The CHS25 – which at ISO 25 was interesting to shoot as it isn’t much fun to use indoors but it’s amazing how bright the mid day sunlight is even on a cloudy day – came out fine. The negatives look like there should be nice shades of grey in those images and like I didn’t overexpose the film (which the instructions claim to be a problem with that film). I’m really looking forward to seeing the results.
The APX400 was a bit of a pain once more. While I think the negatives themselves don’t look too bad, the transparent part of the film has this really dark shade. While it’s not usually a problem to have that when making prints or when scanning the negatives, it still makes it harder to look at the negatives. I also shot this film at ISO1000 and pushed it accordingly. Which may just be a bit too much for this film. I guess I should just switch back to HP5/CHM400 which worked really well for me so far. But I still got so many APX400s.