My Driver

To celebrate my daughter’s18th we actually booked a table at a restaurant - the first in a very long time. I was slightly nervous but it’s what Missy wanted and well, it was her day so who am I to argue.  We actually had a great evening. Tables were well spaced out with see-through partitions separating them. Plus the place felt airy and we were near the door so I soon relaxed. Even better, my future daughter-in-law (Clare - you remember, this Clare…with the shoes!) offered to drive. So I did the decent thing - accepted, and snapped her up en route:

My driver.  HP5+ in HC-110, on MGV deluxe paper.

I had my favourite point&shoot camera (Yashica T4, Zeiss Tessar 35mm f/3.5) loaded with HP5+.  My normal speed rating for HP5+ is 250iso, or even 200 and this works well for me in ID-11.  Trouble is, the Yashica has no means of manually setting the ISO - it takes the film speed from the DX-code pre-printed on the cassette.  So if I drop an HP5+ cassette into it, the Yashica will assume it's a 400 iso film and meter accordingly - which is not what I want.  However, since I bulk load all my 35mm film from 30m lengths it does mean I can fool the camera by loading HP5+ into 200iso DX-coded cassettes (like Kodacolor Gold 200).  I put a small colour-coded sticker on the cassette to tell me it's HP5+ inside and not anything else.  I'm fortunate to have a large stock of empty cassettes courtesy of my local high street film&print shop.  They still get a good number of colour films (and a few B&W) through their doors and every so often they give me a bag-full of the cassettes, so I've got cassettes with almost every imaginable DX code on them.  For most of my 35mm cameras it matters not what code is on the cassette - it's just a few of the more modern point and shoot type cameras that don't have the ability to set the film speed manually, and I don't use them very often, so it's not too big an issue.  I tend to reach for them when I'm out with family doing 'other things' rather than on a photographic expedition, when I'll take a proper camera :)

As you might remember I've had a few issues with ID-11 recently so this time around I used HC-110 at 1:31 dilution for 5 minutes.  In concentrate form HC-11 is gloopy stuff - it's liquid, but only just.   5 minutes seems indecently short compared to 13 minutes in ID-11 and with very short times there's always a risk of timing inconsistencies with regard to filling and emptying the tank.  Next time I might go for a more dilute solution and longer times.  The negs printed ok at grade 5 but were low in contrast - I prefer to be printing around grade 2 or 3, so next time I'll factor in a bit more development.  I should really get off my butt and do some proper testing with HC-110.  In fact, I might just do that today...