Thursday, February 08, 2018
Kentmere 100
In shooting the last roll of Kentmere 100 I put through the Leica I looked for subjects and lighting that I thought would challenge the film's capacities. Exposures were one stop below box speed. I processed the roll in PMK Pyro for ten minutes at 71 degrees, with two tank inversions each fifteen seconds. The negatives were scanned on my old Epson 2450 flatbed using SilverFast SE with the Ilford Pan-F Plus 50 film profile.
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6 comments:
Your exposures are lovely, with none of the blown highlights I find to be characteristic of this film. Is that the secret, to shoot one stop below box speed?
PMK Pyro seems to require an extra stop or so with any film. The up side of the developer is its differential staining feature which produces a wide tonal spectrum. I got nice results from Kentmere 100 at box speed using Rodinal, but that does produce a little more grain. I have also seen very good results in the Flickr forums from a combo of Kentmere with xtol and Ilfosol and I don't think there is any ISO penalty with those developers. I have shot quite a bit of Kentmere 100 at this point and have found it to be very consistent, but it does seem to require a developer that is a good fit with the film.
I have not had much success with Kentmere. Perhaps it is because I have always sent it out to Ilford's lab for processing. I probably should try home processing and see if my results improve.
It does seem like Ilford ought to get the processing right since it is their film. I have had consistently good results with PMK Pyro, but it does require a little more time and the non-acidic TF-4 fixer. People in the Flickr Kentmere forums are pretty good about posting technical details, so it is worth looking there for other possibilities regarding developers. I think I can get Ilfosol locally, so maybe I'll give that a try with some of my remaining stock of Kentmere.
It is also worthwhile to experiment a bit with scanning. I use the SilverFast SE settings suggested by Rick Drawbridge at Photo.net. Depending on how well I meter (or guess) the exposure, the highlights can look blown out. However, a bit of photoshop adjustment shows that plenty of detail is available in both highlights and shadows.
Oh my, you got some lovely tones in these pictures mike. I don't know where I got the idea that pyro was only for large format, it certainly seems to be doing the job here.
I've been happy with pyro and 35mm, but I would like to see how it does with medium format. From what I've seen on the web, it seems to be a good choice for about any b&w film.
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