I haven’t written a post here in a while because of different circumstances. Moving houses and other life changes have taken a lot of time and I had to prioritize those things over blogging. This summer and autumn, however, I have made myself a project called «Stopping where you usually wouldn’t». In this project, I am exploring the places I drive past on a regular basis. Instead of driving past them, I am going to stop and search for something that catches my eye.
Today, I went out for the first round of these trips. I drove towards where my old house was, and stopped about a kilometer before I arrived there, on a little parking place next to the road. A place mainly used by farmers who have grazing sheep in the area. Today, I made my stop. After some searching, I found a composition. A piece of a tiny stream where I saw a fence pole reflecting in the water crossed by a little log that had fallen into the stream. A few rocks in the background. I tried a few shots of the composition and went back to develop the film.
My film om choice this time was a roll of Kentmere 100 that I shot using the Hasselblad. I have not really used Kentmere 100 that much, but I had one in the fridge so I figured why not. When developing, I chose to go with Adox FX39 II. A developer I have used with students in an enrichment course on analog photography. The bottle was opened in late April, and had turned slightly brown-ish, but not worse than I have seen before. I figured it was fine… Which was a mistake. When I took the roll out of the tank I immediately realized that this developer was dead. The negatives were insanely thin and I managed to save only one of the images, the most over exposed one, shot at f2.8, making it a bit soft.
I wish I had used a different developer for this process, but it is a bit too late to change it now, I guess. I’m here presenting you with the result of me completely screwing up the development. Adox FX39 II is a great developer, the Kentmere is a lovely film, this one is 100% on me.
I do like the composition here, but I wish I had more information to go on in making this image. I might have to go and reshoot this location at some point. I am impressed on how much I could retrieve though, the Kentmere 100 must be a pretty decent film with this developer on a regular situation with a functioning developer. My process this time was 8 minutes 30 seconds continuous agitation using the AGO-processor.
I also see that I need to have a look at this film back, as the roll has consistent streaking.
I hope my next entry will show more of a success!
Thank you for reading!
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