Yep. I pushed Kentmere 400 to 1600 and developed it and lived to tell the tale.
Truth is, there’s not much to tell…I worried a bunch and hunted all over for develop recipes for pushed Kentmere. The Massive Dev Chart lists stock D76 for 20 minutes, but I wanted 1:1. FilmDev.org has one for Kentmere 400 at 800 (17 minutes), and another for Tri-X 400 pushed to 1600
I started to worry about it, but decided to just go for it. I pretty much used the Tri-X recipe. Here’s how I did it:
- First, heat (or cool) everything to 20℃ (68℉) – this is much easier in the winter than the summer here in Texas…
- Presoak film for 1 minute to make sure it and the tank are at least 20℃.
- Pour out water, start timer, pour in developer
- agitate very gently (like with the little swizzle stick thing from the Patterson tank) for first 30 or 45 seconds, snap on the lid, and tap gently to release air bubbles
- Develop for 20 minutes, with 30 seconds of uber-gentle agitation at 6:30 and 13
- Stop and fix as normal (I used Ilfostop for 1 minute, then RapidFix for 5 minutes, then wash and hit with some PhotoFlo for a minute or so
Easy. And the results look good to me. These turned out better than my first test of the Kentmere 400 (as of writing, that link was broken… not sure why: something is up with the blog), though that one looked fine. I like the contrast and the detail too.
Just check out this one of the kitchen counter with the mid-morning sun beating on it.
And the plant I’ve been shooting so much of lately looks as good here as in any other attempt, if not better.
Some of that has to do with Capture One Pro 9 and its Luma curve, I think, but anything that Capture One was able to do with the raw file from the Scan-O-Matic 7000 started out as a piece of film, so that film must have had something to do with it too.
This shot of some brothers before Maghrib one night probably would be a bit better if I pulled all the color out of it, but I sorta liked the little bit of yellow/brown in the negatives (or the raw files), though this looks a wee bit green to me now.
This one rivals some of those shots I got out of the expired Ansco, to my eyes anyway.
And this one is soft and gentle and I like it quite a bit. I decided to try the 28-105D on film and see how it worked for the last bit of film. I intended to shoot some Zomb-E too, but I forgot that the rolls of Kentmere 400 I bought were 24 exposures.
The 28-105 D does a pretty nice job on film, and the Kentmere 400 does fine at 1600 too. I expect HP5-Plus does just as well, if not a bit better, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I had some fun with this, and Alhamdulillah it worked! GoGo experiments.
