hi.
i started with C-41 machine processed film, namely Ilford XP-2 Super. It allowed me to go to any 1 hour lab shop to process. I did this for a while, but I always found the quality to be inconsistent, let me explain, you can print C-41 as a color film or as a true black and white. Places like Konata or Ruby in Peninsula will print it in nice B&W. But 1 hour labs in say Kovan will use mixed ink, and the color tends to be Sepia... which isn't too bad, but that isn't the problem, the problem is that many shops don't know how to do C-41 properly Or they do so infrequently that the ink is not fresh. As a result, many of the faults like faint pictures or bleeds which I thought was my overexposure or underexposure was actually lousy processing.
Things came to a head in Jan, when I decided to do my own processing. I decided that I want to make film to negative and from negative scan to digital. I also decided that development should not be a greater hassle than 1 hour labs. That meant that as a film newbie, I wanted room temperature processing and with as little agitation as possible. (Film development is time and temperature sensitive)
I came across STAND DEVELOPMENT with Rodinal. Basically, dilute 3ml of rodinal into 300ml of water, agitate the film for 1 minutes, then leave it alone for a hour. The usual fix and wash was applied after that.
Which film to get ? I did alot of experiments with different type of film with a single developer RODINAL. With APX, TRI-X, NEOPAN and TMAX, grains were unacceptably large due to the higher temperature. In the end, I found that my Ilford XP-2 Super could be developed quite nicely in Rodinal Stand method producing very fine grain. Not everyone was supportive of this method as it was critised as "sub-optimal" or "non-standard" but I don't care now that I have managed to replicate this method many times.
See here for
example1,
example2 and
example3, all developed in Rodinal and Xp-2 and best of all, room temperature tap water.
But I didn't stop, now that I had a fine grain ISO 400 film, I wanted to learn about Pushing film from 400 to 1600. If you think about it, pushing is about overdeveloping underexposured film. This is something which XP-2 does not do well. I am currently trying out 2 other films now, the Neopan 400 (see sample
here) and the venerable Tri-X, the initial signs are encourgaing. Of course, this has to be done at around 20C with other developers (HC-110 and D-76)
So do I how to buy them cheap ? There are a few strategies:
for XP-2, I bought them as generic house-brand on ebay, they are in black canisters in 24 exposures. Around $29 for 15 rolls.
for Neopan 400, I bought Legacy Pro, which is the house brand fro Neopan 400. This was $29 for 20 rolls ($1.50 USD a roll before shipping)
for Tri-X, I bought Arista Premium, the OEM version of Tri-x 400. (Around $2USD a roll before shipping)
It is hard to buy Rodinal from the US, and Ruby doesn't sell it. I bought it from Japanexposure.com but it is very cheap but very expensive to ship.In the end, I spent around $60 to bring it over. But think about it, 3ml out of a 500ml makes it roughly 150 rolls of development. or 40 cents to develop 1 roll. Not bad actually.
Do a search on the web, you can find it cheap. Of course it makes sense to have a VPOST account to buy things off the US vendors, and make sure you have a CC with a low max limit to limit your damage against fraud.
raytoei
)
