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During the Covid Crisis, I'm bunkered down at home unable to use the college lab I manage. So I've been developing film in my films in the laundry room again with my trusty old JOBO tanks. School was wrapping up and a student found a holder with film in them and I offered to process. I can process 12 sheets at a time with my Jobo and I'm lazy, so I try to fill it and use semi-stand. So I took her two  sheets and found a few of mine to process and made a few to at least get close to the capacity of the tank. Also, recently I "repaired" my old Sakai (Toyo) half plate camera that was converted to 4x5. My high school teacher, Vince Bernucci at Independence High School was kind enough to give this to me in the mid 1980's. At some point the ground glass got broken and recently it occurred to me that I had a transplantable one I could replace it with. The bellows was also all squished up, and I sort of managed to partially straighten that out. Unlike some of my camer

Not sure why I'm even looking, I've got plenty. Maybe so I can advise students at my school? In any case, I found myself looking to see what was the cheapest B&W 120 film I could find. In general, I think there's no such thing as a bad film.There are films that are easier to use and process, there are films with various traits that may not be suited for intended use. But I'm no longer interested in the sharpest finest grain films. I used to shoot Tech Pan and Agfapan 25 in the 1980's. Now I look at the prints and negs and, some are pretty nice. But on the whole they are too contrasty. I switched to ORWO NP20 (and later NP22 in the USA) and much prefer those negs. After ORWO stopped making consumer films, I moved on to Acros. Fuji Acros was a beautiful film, with wonderful tones as well as fine grain and minimal reciprocity failure issues. So today I'm going to do some searching and put the results up here. Please note, I'm in the US, so it's US suppl

The use of Rodinal is most common with Semistand Development. I've been playing with Semistand development on and off for a while with the more common Rodinol. Yesterday I gave HC110 a try. And I liked it. Dilution: (from syrup): 1:120 Temperature: unmeasured Prewash: time unrecorded (maybe 5 minutes) Time: 40 minutes Inversion: first 30 seconds or so, then one more time roughly 20 minutes (half way) into development Equipment used: My old trusty JOBO 4x5 drum, Kodak HC-110 (duh!), Lauder fix, lots of water Film(s): these show only Fomapan (Arista.edu) 4x5 samples, but the exact same shots were done with outdated Agfapan 100, Kodak Plus-X Pan, and Tri-X professional (320) Camera: Toyo (Omega) 45d with Fuji Fujinon 250mm f6.3 and Caltar IIn (Rodenstock Sironar N) 150mm f5.6 Scanner: Epson V700 All in all, I was quite happy with the results. Density of negatives was pretty good. I actually shot two of each motif on four different types of films and processed t

As the film industry falls apart and cheap film is hard to come by, especially film available in all formats. I've bought a lot of Fomapan. Fomapan (also rebadged Arista.edu) has been a bit more of a challenge than I had expected. I don't hate the film, but I find lots of shortcomings. I knew going in to ordering Fomapan that the reciprocity characteristic was very unfavorable for those unintentionally working with long exposure times. I tried using that to my advantage with neutral density filters for long daylight exposures. Richmond-San Rafael Bridge - Fomapan 100 long daylight exposure There I found two problems. (1) Contrast and (2) grain. Many of my long daylight exposures had highlights that blocked up into white mush when printed. The other seemingly amazing thing to me was the grain structure of those long exposures. The printable negs were incredibly grainy- even when printed in an enlarger to smallish sizes (square with rebate border on 8x10 paper making ab