Are you ready to Party? I hope so, ’cause it’s time for the TMAX Party!
Well, actually, it’s not… I’m way late for it, or way early for it. The first round ended the third full week of March; the second starts up the first week of April.
Oh well.I’ll say right from the start that I hate(d) TMAX. Hate is a strong word for a film stock, but it’s accurate enough. I find (or found) it a bit too clinical for my taste. I shot a roll or two of TMY 100 some years ago, and didn’t find anything worth sharing. If you follow this blog, you know I’ll share just about anything, so it must’ve been really bad.
Now. I swore off the film parties when the FP4 Party ended, but I wanted to give TMAX another chance, and wanted to shoot the 400 variant, so I decided to jump in. I guess I’m glad I did.
There’s nothing earth shattering here, and while I strongly prefer other film stocks to TMAX 400, if it was the last film on earth, I’d probably shoot it.
One thing… I finally broke down and bought a yellow filter, a (used) Tiffen 8 Yellow 2 filter from Garland Camera. I took several tests with the filter on and off, but the differences were slight. Part of that is post production; part of it is the rather flat conditions I shot these in, both environmentally and creatively.
These two were shot from the same vantage point, seconds apart, both with auto-exposure. I processed the “without filter” shot in Capture One, then copied and pasted the settings to the “with filter” shot.
I didn’t learn too much, and really didn’t try to (shame on me), but I felt really cool shooting black & white with a filter…
So that’s about it. I don’t hate TMY 400 to the extent that I hated TMY 100, but I’ll probably stick to HP5+, even though it’s a completely different sort of film. Well, except for the April TMAX Party (shoot week should be April 2-9 or 3-10, if you want to join in!).
By the way, I used Ilfotec HC, 1+31 at 68F, for 6:30. I love the development times and ease of use, but don’t really know enough about what I’m looking at to comment on the developer, though I feel really cool to be one of those guys with multiple black & white developers in the cabinet… So that’s win, I guess.
