Mr. Brown, ISO 6… There are slower black & white films out there, but not in my fridge. I shot a roll a few months back with good results. It’s July in TX, so there should be plenty of sun, and the 4th of July means a little small town-type parade in Irving…
Sounds perfect for the second installment of the #summerfilmparty, right?
Eh.I’m not sure if the metering was off, or if Mr. Brown just doesn’t like Standing around…
I was feeling a bit lazy on Development Day. I had a roll of HP5+ and this roll of Mr. Brown, plus two rolls of E6 (also for the #summerfilmparty), and had some chores and other things to do, and couldn’t be bothered to run two single rolls of black & white. If I had some Diafine on hand, that would’ve sufficed: with that, everything is 6 minutes, regardless of ISO. Alas. So I went with a good old Rodinal stand.
The first problem I encountered was the heat. It was about 80℉ in my kitchen, thanks to an undiagnosed, at that time, malfunctioning A/C unit. I loaded the HP5 first, and it went in fine, but the movement got my hands sweating a bit, and the Mr. Brown, with its super thin, very floppy, film just didn’t want to go on the reels. It would go on a third of the way, then stick. and I kept trying having to rip it off the reel and start over again, frustration mounting.
If you didn’t know, Mr. Brown is an extremely fragile film, more fragile than anything else I’ve shot, by far, and the violence in the darkbag caused it some pain.
And then, I think I didn’t do the stand correctly… The HP5+ had a bunch of black dots embedded in the negatives (they came out white when inverted), and I think it was from hard water… Here’s an example:
I’m not positive on that, though: the Mr. Brown had no such specks in it. Instead, it has splotches, completely blocked up shadows, blown highlights, flattened midtones. I saw no such issues with D76 1+1 in my first roll review.
Let this be a lesson to me: Film Photography takes patience. When I get lazy, errors happen.
So the first #summerfilmparty roll was a failure, partly or mostly or entirely of my own design. It’s a shame too, because the parade was really fun. I hadn’t been to one in decades, and my wife had only been to BIG parades, like the Puerto Rican Day parades in NY and NJ, or the Bastille Day parades in Paris, nothing like this. Nothing like the new mayor riding in a convertible Corvette waving and tossing candy…
…that you can’t make out, much, thanks to the hosed development/exposure/whatever. I do like the scratch coming off the left rear tire like a just-married streamer, and I’m thankful for errors that help me remember, help to remind me, help me to learn.
And Alhamdulillah for the two rolls of slide film I also shot, otherwise, I’d only have this failure to talk about.
