FP4 Plus Party, Dev Week part one.

Smena 8M + 35mm.

This was my first time out with the Smena. It’s a quirky little Russian camera. Plastic. Toy-like, if not for the fact that it has apertures and shutter speeds and a cocking shutter.

I put gaffer tape over the seams on the lid to the film compartment just in case of light leaks. The viewfinder is pretty close to useless.

Results…
– 27 shots out of a 24 shot roll. Cool.
– 1 accidental double exposure.
– A few underexposed, a few overexposed.
– A handful of not perfectly exposed.
– Bunches not quite framed up the way I’d intended.

Can’t really tell about focus, but there are probably a few keepers, and I’ll know which to submit next week once I run them through the scanner.

Tomorrow.

This is an iPhone shot of the negs, cut and slipped into a negative preserver, placed on an LED light pad, inverted in Photoshop.

Today I’ll tackle the 120 film development.

Cool and dark.

Life’s about making adjustments.

My extremely rocky re-entry into developing film last year resulted in one botched and one barely salvageable roll of Ilford Pan F Plus, shot with my Hasselblad 500c/m and Holga 120S.

I was using a new dark bag to load the film onto Paterson reels. Even though it was done in an air conditioned room, the amount of heat my nervous and excited hands and arms generated caused enough steam in the bag to make the film stick to itself, totally ruining the Hassy roll.

The Holga roll wasn’t much better. The edges of the film got pretty crinkled, but I managed to feed the whole roll onto the reel without sticking to itself in the process.

Seems like a lot of trouble, huh?

The hall bathroom in our home has a separate water closet with a door. I can close the hall door, get my film rolls, reels, the tank parts, scissors, and any thing else I might need set up on the lid of the plastic tub where all this dev stuff is stored. I then turn off the light over the sinks. It’s easy to move the tub into the closet and close the second door.

It is absolutely dark in there, but I put a rolled up towel at the base of the door, just in case. I also take off my watch. After everything is situated, I sit on the toilet lid with the tub in front of me and turn off the light.

Seems like a lot of trouble, huh?

I haven’t screwed up a single roll since making this change, so the effort is worth it.

Plus, I’ve ditched the dark bag.