Lucky Me

cold ocean air
Originally uploaded by jjlamz

Yesterday night I finally decided to go and develop my roll of Lucky 100 "new". I'm not too familiar with Lucky films so I really don't know what the "new" entails.

As I had mentioned in my previous post I prepped this roll of Lucky 100 to be pushed 2 stops to 400... fine I lied! I'd forgotten to change the iso setting on my camera and had already made to nice shots ;P

oops I thought, but its about time to try pushing something.

Now before I get into the details, I should mention that many people have found that Lucky 100 does not respond all that well to pushing and any more than 2 stops will end up with some rather blotchy results. I'd made my mind prior and I didn't wanna get too greedy and 400 is my normal shooting preference anyways.

Development

I searched around the "net" to find some developing times for pushing to 400 and to my surprise there wasn't much or I was looking in the wrong places. Even the massive Dev chart didn't have a 400 dev time, but normal dev times are there (fyi). So what was I to do? I am in no way a film guru but based on my personal understanding of consumer films I assumed that BW 100 film is simply BW 100 film, so although they may render differently any BW 100 film could be used as a rough base. Using that assumption I used the tmax 100 chart as a guide.

The massive dev chart shows the following for Tmax 100:

Film / developer / asa/iso / dilution / 35mm / 120mm / Temp
Tmax 100/ Tmax Dev / 400 / 1 - 4 / 9 / 9 / 24 C

There is also another entry calling for 10 min. with the other variables the same.

With this info I basically made a guesstimate of 11 min. as my dev is stored at 20 C so it won't be quite as active as at 24C.

So all ready I went ahead and souped the film and did inversions/agitation every 2 min and let still the final 2 min. *I normally do the suggested 1 inversion per minute but I've found my negatives a bit grainy for normal box speed developing.

B&W developing is alot of trial and error it seems and there isn't a right or wrong way to it. On this first trial, I am quite pleased with the results so far. test successful.

Lucky me.

rain or shine

sun kissed
Originally uploaded by jjlamz

I've decided that tomorrow, regardless of the weather I will be taking my camera with me for some sunday shooting. Currently I've got a roll of Lucky 100 SHD loaded in my Voigtlander R3M. I'm waiting to finish it off as I'm planning to push it to 400. Lets see how it turns out (fingers crossed).

Gear talk:

I have been doing my own B&W developing for the last year or so and have been pretty happy so far with my results. I'm doing a very safe and text book developing so far using TMax Dev on various popular BW films such as TMax, Tri-X, HP5+. I haven't tried pushing my films yet and the next few rolls will be used for testing. I also wanna try some different Developers like Rodinal and Xtol in the near future.

As for my R3M, i'm pretty happy so far with it and I'll probably do a little mini review on it soon, somthing along the lines of a long term user review.

Thanks for reading.

J

first blog in like years

I've decided that I should start blogging again. This is odd since my previous blog was a bit of a failure. so this is where I will share thoughts on many things from daily life rubbish to maybe a personal review on some new toy I picked up.

If you are unlucky enough to stumble upon my blog my sincerest apologies! there isn't much here.

Welcome to my blog. Sit, relax.