Those film shots mentioned in my last post about playing with artificial light? They were a total loss after being developed.
I was so pissed by the waste of a rather dear roll of film that I immediately grabbed the Nikon FM2 and drove to the local country park to shoot another roll of the same film. I had to know where I messed up.
It turns out that making twenty-four photos is not a quick affair. I walked for two hours, now and then stopping to take a picture of some random nature thing, before I could return home for Round Two of developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius. But now I was armed with a sous-vide heater to keep the chemicals at a constant temperature. And I was going to agitate the chemicals by inversion instead of rotating the small plastic stick/rod.
It paid off. The development, that is—the photography, meh.
Was this success a fluke? The only way to be sure was to go for Round Three of developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius. To up the challenge, I used a twenty-year-old roll of Fujifilm Superia 400, rated at ISO 200, to photograph stuff from around the house. Again, finishing the twenty-four frames took a while. But the subsequent development process was done slowly and carefully.
The pictures that came out were as good as they could be from expired film. I had nailed developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius.
I believe the most significant change I made was the use of inversion agitation—which looks like shaking a cocktail drink, except with less vigour—instead of agitation with the stick/rod.
Even P was impressed.