I recently had a great learning experience with film at KEN mode’s recent show at the Windsor that I feel is worth sharing.
I’d shot a few rolls of my current favourite film Ilford HP5 during Withdrawal and Full of Hell. If you’re reading this and saw Full of Hell you can understand how I could lose track and run out of frames. The only b&w roll I had left was Ilford Delta 100. I first thought my shooting for the night was over. My flash proved flaccid with dead batteries. I’d been metering at iso 3200 all night, honouring the available light. Does it make sense trying to push iso100 film to 3200? In this economy would that just be a waste of film? But I was seeing KEN Mode for the first time, and once they began so did the experiment. Push.
The Massive Dev Chart – A film processing chart online most analoggers are familiar with – only showed processing ratios and times for Delta100 with Rodinol developer for up to iso 150. I needed time and a ratio for 3200. So being given time/ratio for iso 50,100,150, I used basic mathematics all photographers at one time had to use: divided times and ratios based on their trend, and came up with 1 part Rodinol, eight parts water for 34 minutes.
Lately when using this Rodinol knock-off developer Blazinal, my ratios on average have been 1+50 and hover around 20 minute develop time. That works out to 6mLs of developer per roll of film. That’s borscht. The new ratio called for 33, that is potent.
The following are the results. Here’s to KEN mode. Here’s to film and its ability to continually excite and surprise.
