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.