A walk around town with the Hasselblad - part 2

After walking around with the Haselblad a few days ago I finally finished the roll. Had two more frames left. Initially my plan was to push develop the film since I’de rated the Kentmore 400 as 1600ASA. But after watching a few videos on Youtube I came to another desition. I thought i’de try out stand development. For those of you that doesn’t know what stand development is, it’s actually very close to what it sounds like. You pour in the developer, agitate just a few times in the beginning and then let it stand on the counter and let it develop slowly. In my case I did a 10 seconds, slow agitation, put the Paterson tank down and left it for a good hour. I think it was one hour and ten minutes to be exact.

So what does it mean? Well, when choosing stand development, it means that as I stated abov, there’s minimal agitation and the film sits in the chemicals for a long time. This will cause the details in the shadows to build up much slower and give the film a much higher dynamic range in these shadows. Even though it’s developed over an hour or more, it will still preserve the highlights in your shots. This happens because you use very little developer in your mix and during this time it will exhaust itself. From what I’ve read it handles different exposure settings very well. So if I had thought of this earlier I could actually have “changed” the ASA as I took each picture. I’ll try to remember that the next time.

By using stnad development you don’t need to use too much chemicals either. In my case my target was 500ml og solution. I used Rodnial, or ADOX Adonal if you like as my developer and a ratio of 1:100. So 5ml of Adonal and the rest plain water. As for a stopping agent, I only used water. The solution is so worn out after more than an hour that a simple stopbath of water is more than enough. After that I put in the fixer, then rinsed it of and ended it with a bath in Photo-Flo.

I really liked this way of developing the negatives. It reduced the amount of chemicals needed for the job, I could sit down and have another cup of fresh coffee and watch a couple more videos on film photography on youtube while I waited for the developer to do it’s thing.

And the results? Well, I don’t really know yet because the negatives are hanging in the shower to dry. But from what I can see, it looks pretty darn good. I’m really looking forward to scan these images. Some of the images I took in very dark conditions, some at dusk. So the variation is pretty big. I’m also curious to see how much grain there are in these images and if I was lucky enough with a couple of them regarding available light. It might have been to dark and I might have miscalculated them a bit. But at least 10 of those 12 images seems to be pretty good.

My next post will be focused on the scanning and editing (if any) of these images and hopefully include a few of the finnished images.