Todays Exploration

Today I wanted to mix things up a bit and shoot some film.

One of the things that I'm doing lately is using a 400 speed film in my camera and keeping a couple of filters on hand: ND4 and Orange 3 factor.

The idea is that I can go out on a bright day with the filter on and meter at 100 iso. Then if it gets overcast or I move indoors I just take the filter off.

My Minolta SR-T201 cannot generally hit bang-on whatever the meter says. If it reads as 350 I just set it at 250 and take a tad bit of overexposure. No worries on that.

Today I shot the orange filter exclusively when outdoors. Nearly every shot was taken at 1/250 with aperture f8.

And I was shooting with TMax 400 for a change. A modern tabular grained film that is twice as expensive as my typical kentmere 400. And being tabular grained means that Rodinal is out of the question so I tried a new development process.

Developing TMax 400 with HC 110

I developed with Dilution B 1+31. In my patterson tank this is 9 ml developer and 281 ml water. Pretty economical.

The development is done at 20 C for 5.5 minutes. I agitated with inversions for the first 30 seconds and 3 inversions every minute after.

Out on the Town

Edmond Ok is one of my favorite places to photo walk. That said I've never felt like I actually succeeded in capturing the town. Today was a continuation of my efforts to slowly pick it apart.

I still need to scan the negatives. However, looking at them I can tell that I'm going to be very happy with my results. There is very little grain and it is very high contrast. TMax is a very contrasty / punchy film to begin with and I dialed it up to eleven with the orange filter.

I'm going to have a lot more texture in the skies and hopefully the buildings will glow a bit.