Yet another time, I find myself out trying the ultra-cheap AGFA APX100 that I managed to buy 100 ft of earlier this year. This time, I loaded it into an old Delta 400-casette because I wanted to use it in one of my more automatic cameras. My initial thought was to use the Minolta Dynax camera I own, but since I loaded it a cartridge DX-coded 400, and the fact that I cannot override the ISO on the Minolta, I had to look another way for this outing, and I opted for the Nikon F80 with the Voigtländer Skopar 28-80mm Zoom lens I used in the last entry.
I have previously struggled quite substantially with making this film work for my type of photography, and for this time, I decided to go out to a logging area close to where I live. When you are cutting down trees in Norway, you have to let some trees stand to accommodate for the loss of animal homes, and this creates a rather interesting atmosphere where some trees really stand out. This very contrasty scene should help the film to get this contrasts out rather than creating some bland mushy mess, as it tends to do with very green scenes.
For positive things, I really found that the sky was brought out really well on these images, if that is due to the exposure or the film I am not sure, but it does create some extra mood and context to the images which I find really nice. Also, this time, I chose to overexpose the film a stop in exposure and develop for the full film speed of 100. Ive found that this gives me the best negatives with this setup and I chose to develop with ID-11. I am not sure if I find ID-11 to be a good match for this film as it seems to enhance the feeling of the grain somewhat. The film itself is extremely grainy for a 100 ISO film, and maybe the best idea is just to embrace the grainy feeling and go with Rodinal.
As you can see in the sky on this image, the grain structure of this film is very coarse and raw even with a fine-grain developer like ID-11, and I actually find it rather unpleasant in these images. Just to rule out the fact that this could be down to my scanner, Epson V600, I went for a quick dark-room session making a print of the Thistle-image, and the grain is very prominent even in relatively small enlargements such as 4×5 or 10×8. This film might not really work very well for landscape-photography in any way, and I think my next experiment with this film will be more in the fields or architecture or urban details and embracing the rawness and graininess of these negatives.
I actually really like the composition of the image above, but it is clear that it does not really work with this setup of film, camera and lens. I like that centered slightly diagonal stem and the upright spruce behind it, bit I do not care that much for the mushy gray grassy-area where one cannot really distinguish what is grass and what is small spruces. Also, the sky shows the raw grain that I feel is rather unpleasant even though it makes for somewhat of a moody feeling.
Cheap Camera Adventures 