Well the good news is that we did get to Ballintoy on Thursday last. I had the 'Blad all primed and ready to go but when I lifted the bag to go out the door I had a sudden change of heart and took the pinhole instead. Probably a good decision as the light wasn't great - a bit flat and dull - plus the pinhole bag is a whole lot lighter. We had a good couple of hours wandering around before the cold got the better of us and we called it a day. We timed it well, as the first spots of rain started just as I hit the main coast road on the way home. This was probably the best of the shots, looking West towards Benbane Head/Causeway:
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| Ballintoy on the TiTAN 4x5 pinhole - about a 30s exposure if I remember correctly. Fomapan 200 rated at 50, developed in HC-110 1:50 for just shy of 7 minutes (Uniroller, continuous agitation) and printed on Foma 133 paper. |
As you might recall, I've been having problems with the Unicolor drum roller on account of the gasket leaking like a sieve. A fellow film-shooter friend from Belfast offered to 3D print a new one for me. I was a tad sceptical (I know nothing about 3D printers) but he printed it with TPU, which is some kind of flexible filament. It's not a perfect fit but it's very close and on this run I lost only a few ml of developer over the 7 minutes - not enough to have any effect on the 4 negatives. So we'll tweak the design a little and try to see if we can get a better fit but so far so good. If it lasts as even half as long as the original gasket I'll be a happy chappie. My friend has used his 3D printer for a whole dose of film-related gear since he acquired it a couple of months ago - including printing a winding knob for a Bronica, various film holders and fixing his tripod. Impressive!
How do you get on with the FOMA 200? Just shot my first roll on 120, look very thin. I note you are shooting it 2 stops under, is that because you think that is it’s speed or to counter some reciprocity failure, both, or summing else! 3D printing so useful for lost or busted bits!
ReplyDeleteThat is a good question. I bought two boxes of it a while back and am nearing the end of the first. I like the price of it, compared to Ilford (Kodak is double again) but the quality is not as good. I seem to get a lot more scratches, dust and pinholes than I ever did with FP4 or HP5. I'm going to shoot the next few sheets on Ilford and see if my memory is correct. Depending on the outcome I might just go back to Ilford's products, since I don't shoot a lot of 4x5.
DeleteI read somewhere online about rating Fomapan 200 at 50 and so that's where I started with it. To my surprise, I found I don't have to take reciprocity failure into account (the thing that everyone moans about with Foma), even with exposures of up to a minute long.