a few months back i bought 3 rolls of this film for $5.00 from john's camera corner in blacksburg, va. not being one to shoot expired film that often (as especially not as expired as september 1983) i was somewhat skeptical of using it even though i was told it had been kept refrigerated.
a couple weeks ago we went out on a sunday to shoot and i brought a roll along in my bag, and once i finished the roll of portra or arista.edu 400 or whatever it was i decided on a whim to give this film a try.
i think immediately after i loaded it i had forgotten what i put in the camera, and i was metering and shooting as iso 400 when in fact this film is rated at iso 125.
i finished up the roll this past sunday when we were shooting in downtown roanoke, va. i was excited to see how some of my shots from there were going to turn out, especially since i have my tripod back in commission after a month-long hiatus. i finished the last shot, wound to the end of the roll and opened the back- eek! (that was not the film i thought i had been shooting...) so after cursing for a few minutes and throwing the roll in my bag, thinking all was lost as i usually do when i make a mistake, i loaded the roll of rollei retro 400s i had in my bag for quite a while. we finished up the day and ate dinner and went to bed, etc., etc.
yesterday morning i woke up and was thinking of the roll of pxp i thought i had ruined when suddenly it hit me- "HEY, all i did was basically push the film. no need for alarm/self loathing, everything will be okay, etc." (can you tell i have never intentionally pushed film before?)
i read around a bit online and found where a guy had pushed this film but developed using hc-110. all i had on hand was rodinal (no) and d-76. i went to the massive dev chart and found a recipe using d-76 stock for ei 500, and decided that was a no-go. thankfully there are guidelines for push processing on said site, so i went by kodak's data sheet using d-76 1:1 for normal development (7 minutes) multiplied by 2.25 mins. since i was approximately pushing 2 stops. (that equals 15.75, hooray for calculators)
i spooled my film, which of course was curly as hell but it didn't give me horrible problems.
when i started mixing up my chemicals i remembered that i had one kodak anti-fog no. 1 tablet on hand and thought this would be a good test case for it. i used half, which might've been overkill in hindsight but if the film was fogged it worked. i heated up 250 ml of distilled water in the microwave to 85 degrees, put in half the crushed tablet & mixed the 250 ml d-76 stock in.
in the background i had my film presoaking, and i probably soaked it for over 5 minutes... not intentionally, but i was trying to get my chemicals down close to 68. i gave up when it got to around 72 and the film had been soaking for nearly 10 minutes. surprisingly, the water from the presoak came out clear.
i only developed the film for a total of 13 minutes because the temperature was a little higher than it should be and i didn't want to run the risk of overdeveloping. it probably could've went the extra 2+ minutes, but the negatives turned out okay, albeit, thin.
this film has a very thin base and the emulsion side was more fragile when wet than most films i normally use. the film actually slipped right out of the clip as i was holding it up to the light to inspect, so i wouldn't hang something heavier than maybe a tiny binder clip on the end while drying.
i scanned a few from this roll today, although it was pretty tough considering how curved they are.
i had to adjust the curves in this one a bit- i find i've had to do that a lot lately.
nothing done in post here; this is pretty close to what the wall looked like at that time.
i thought this looked better scanned as a color negative.
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