A hazard of shooting old film cameras is that the variables that determine success or failure tend to proliferate over time. It gets hard as a result to determine the cause of certain problems that arise, and I find myself sometimes questioning the effectiveness of my developers. The only thing to do at that juncture is to load some film in one of the cameras in which I have a lot of confidence and see what comes up in the developer. I chose recently to do that with my Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35.
I found the '50s era Ikonta about fifteen years ago in a Las Cruces pawn shop. A little cleaning turned it into a solid performer; the Synchro-Compur shutter is very reliable, and the coated Tessar lens always yields sharp images. I loaded a roll of Kentmere 100, shot most of it on a walk through Albuquerque's Old Town, and then dunked the film in HC-110, dilution B for six minutes. As little as 9.4 mL of HC-110 will do for a roll of film, so a bottle of the stuff takes a long time to get through. I was pleased to see that my half-bottle looks good for quite a few more rounds.
5 comments:
WOW that grain though. Reminds me of the very, very expired Tri-X I shot earlier this year.
Yes, pretty pebbly.
I should add that I was only looking at the negative density to determine how well the developer was working. I did do some scans using different film profiles, but they all looked pretty grainy to me. I recall getting somewhat better performance in the past from Kentmere, but haven't used it enough to really know what to expect from the film. I should probably try Kentmere again with one of the developers that the company recommends.
I've never shot Kentmere, but I do like my grainy film/dev combos. I'd throw that into some Rodinal and let it cook! Nice shots by the way.
I do have some Kentmere left and some Rodinal, so I'll give that a try.
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