Wednesday 3 August 2016

Same old

Well after a couple of days of reasonable weather the rain is back.  This is turning out to be a pretty awful summer, weather-wise.  The thing is, in the not too distant future the days will be getting noticeably shorter and the temperatures noticeably lower.  If we stand any chance of warm, dry weather it should be now, so this is not good.

I went into the darkroom this morning to develop a couple of films that got finished the other day...only to find that I was out, or nearly out of ID-11.  Not enough left in the bottle to develop anything.  So even that didn't go to plan.  I had another box of it on the shelf, so I set about mixing it up so maybe later today I'll get back to Plan A and produce some negs.

In the meantime, I bring you an old one of some trees:

Somerset Wood, by the Trim Trail.  Not that there's much of a Trim Trail anymore - that fad seemed to die a death about 10 years ago.  But it's still a decent walk in the country, with lots of interesting paths through the trees.

Just in case you're interested, with ID-11 there's a sachet of powder A and another of powder B.  You start with 3.75 litres of water, at 40 degrees.  Add A, stir it about a bit, then add B and stir some more.  Lots more.  Then bring the volume up to 5 litres and you're good to go.  Well, you're good to decant it into some storage bottles, hopefully air-tight and then you're good to go.  You've 3 choices how to use it, stock, 1+1 or 1+3.  Stock just seems extravagant.  I get decent results with 1+1 and that's my usual method.  I've used 1+3 and it's OK, but the times get a bit on the long side - 20mins or so, compared to 11mins (FP4+) or 13mins (HP5+) with 1+1.

Anyway, we're off to Ballymoney, to try and see some megalithic tombs - these ones, to be precise.  Hopefully the landowner won't see us, or if he does, won't mind too much.

2 comments:

  1. Interested, very much. I've not been known to use ID-11 at all, not regularely anyway. I might need to give it a go soon just to see what the fuss is all about. The mixing should be easy enough to get done, even to some norwegian bloke without a university grade in mathematics or anything.
    I quite like the Kodak HC-110. For now, anyway. It's prone to change, I know that much.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ID-11 seems to work pretty well for me. I probably had better results with DD-X, but it's expensive when you waste as much film as I do ;)

      Delete