After the barbecue, it took me several days to finish off the three rolls of Kosmo Foto Mono. I shot a bit around the house and office, but wasn’t really feeling it, and in fact, I mostly forced the shots out on a couple of walks around a couple of parks in Grand Prairie and Irving. Still, I think it’s enough to give you some ideas about what this film is capable of.
My first stop was the Mike Lewis park just across the Grand Prairie line after work one day. It was mostly empty, with a few older joggers, a landscape tech, and some day care kids with their minders. They all had on clothes appropriate to the near 90F temperature and bright sun; I was in slacks and a button down, with an undershirt, and my work loafers… Good times.
As you can see, my broken Cosina CX-2 overexposed everything quite a bit, but I was able to pull results back in post fairly well. The Sears 500 R}F did a decent job with its exposure, as long as I had a reasonable shutter speed selected (given conditions, I’m sure I had it at 1/500th almost the whole time). I finished off the roll in the Cosina easily on this walk.
The next day, or maybe two days later, my darling, adorable wife and I walked around Towne Lake Park, a little neighborhood park we like just south of us in Irving, and I was able to find the ends of the rolls in the LC-A and Sears 35 R|F there.
So that wraps up my time with the Kosmo Foto Mono. For medium-slow ISO b/w stock, I’ll probably stick with FP4+ or maybe the Rollei RPX-100 (and it strikes me now that I’ve never really talked about that film, so guess what’ll be coming next week…). It might be the developer more than anything, but I prefer the rendering, grain, and tonal variation I get from those stocks to anything I got out of the Kosmo Foto Mono. (And it might be my mid-late-Ramadan malaise too, Astaghfirullah).
In any case, kudos to Stephen Dowling for putting out a great (rebranded) film and doing what he can to keep film production and distribution alive in the 21st Century. At time of writing, he has 455 rolls in stock, so go pick some up and do what you can to keep film alive too.
