It’s been a year now!

Yes, a whole year and some since I developed my last film. I checked!

And that year has been a long slow agony. Really, a horrible series of days, weeks and months that are mostly lost for me.

Why that… sorry, not really your business. Suffice to say that life kept me from doing what I really wanted to do.

And I listened to life, stupid me.

Until now!

The last 4 days I shot two rolls of black and white film, one Agfa APX 100 and one Kosmo Foto 100 in my Spotmatic SP… and it was great.

I just went out to a place I have seen very often in those last months, a place I always told me I simply had to make photos of… and never did.

The weather was not ideal! Yes, it was sunny, but the scene cries for some heavy black clouds with lightning flashing around. But you have to take what you get and I was really happy to immerse myself in photography again.

Walking around with a camera in hand, looking at stuff, making decisions about framing and angles and so on is simply a deliverance. Walking about with a camera and just following my thoughts, getting lost in photography is the best thing you can do.

But I really had to force myself!

See, we’re building a house. OK not we ourselves, rather we’re having a house built. And this house is really, really overdue. Should have been finished end of november and here we arestill with the bare minimum, all our stuff being in storage. We had to leave our apartment that was already rented on.

Even my developing stuff is in storage, unreachable. So I just ordered a nice cheap starter kit from FOTOIMPEX, like a beginner and I went for it. And like a beginner I mixed 300 ml of water with 3 ml of Rodinal for stand develoment, brought it up to the right temperature and poured it into the development tank. I started the timer and… oh no! I got 2 rolls of film in there! Takes 600 ml for those 2 rolls!!!

Luckily I still had water at 20° left and mixed another batch. In it went and off went the timer… again.

Now I wait… 30 minutes, then a gentle inversion and another 30 minutes and we’ll see…

Yes, I know there’s no real suspense here as you saw the results at the beginning of this post already… but I tried 😉

And for me the suspense is real. As I write this the first 30 minutes are…. yes, just over now! Timer beeping back there.

Inversions done… 30 more minutes! And I promise I’m not going to change the text of this post, no matter the outcome!

Luckily I have my scanner around so I’m getting ready for an intense evening of power-scanning!

Ah yes, Film I hear you say, scanner, developing… how come. Your latest stuff, as rare as it was, was mostly digital. But I’ll leave that explanation for a future post. Soon! And I have an idea for still another one… I’m unstoppable now!

I hope.

Still, anyway the negatives will turn out, I had real fun! And I’m not stopping! Promised!

…..some hours later:

Hmmm, the negatives have dried, as have the water stains on them. Unfortunately I don’t have my jug of distilled water here. And it seems that the local water is mostly made of solid stuff. I’ll have to rinse them in distilled water and dry them again. There’s no problems, only solutions.

Apart from that, they seem very much OK! Scanning tomorrow!

…..the next day:

Aaaaah, the stuff I definitely did not miss… scanning. Lots of coffee, lots of tea, lots of time. But I’ll get there…

Done!

I’m quite happy with the results. Well I guess my acceptance threshold is rather low but I like some of those a bit. I’m not through post processing all of them, but in this post are those that caught my eye when I scanned the lot. Might be more goodies there.

Stay tuned and don’t forget to comment! Critics very welcome.

Thanks for your patience waiting for this stuff.