A damaging weekend...
One roll of Ilford FP4+ wound tightly round the spindle of the reel instead of on the rails. Completely and irremediably (it is a word) fucked.
I've loaded hundreds, possibly thousands of reels with film and never done that before. It is a sad moment when you take the lid off the developing tank and see it. The anticipation turns to disbelief and I cruelly turn on myself for being so cack-handed.
So I went out the next day bright and early and repeated the walk. And the dev.
My confidence is now low but I have to get back on the horse.
In the film changing tent the film seemed to wind on to the reels OK. I'd changed the reel too, just in case. Development went OK.
But when I unrolled the film from the reel the sprocket holes on one side of the film had been damaged.
OMG! FFS! Is it me? Are the reels bent? Is the FP4+ at fault? Has the camera mashed up the film? Too many questions. But I'm guessing it was me. I have not yet got back on the horse.
My confidence has taken a battering but I had to try and rescue what I could.
The eagle eyed will notice some damage to the film and I'm not sure it was completely flat in the scanner. But considering what went before I'm not too unhappy.
The irony is that these two days were very enjoyable in every other way. I'm really happy to be out taking (analogue) photos again and I love using the Nikon F2. It has no meter (just the DE-1 finder). I was using a Sekonic L-208 Twinmate to (roughly) meter the light. I'm trying to guess correctly. Not always correctly...
I've tried to keep to things seen through trees (or foliage). It kind of works.
I like this lens - the Nippon Kogaku 28mm f/2.8 Nikkor-H Auto. It is pre AI (Auto Indexing, not Artificial Intelligence), pre Nikon. Nikon (the corporation) was originally Nippon Kogaku which was conflated to Nikon. The naming/branding is very confusing. Manufactured in 1971. 54 years old in today's money. It is best limiting it to apertures f8 and f11 (it only goes between f/3.5 and f/16 anyway).
This lens is a gorgeous lump of glass and metal with a solid tactile clicky aperture ring and silky smooth focus (both rings scalloped in a very pleasing way). Like all pre AI and AI lenses it has an exponentially long focus pull between 0.6m (closest focus) to 2m then rocketting to infinity (and beyond?) in a short space - which I happen to like.
Coincidentally I have been reading 'Capturing the Light : The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry' by Roger Watson & Helen Rappaport. This lens renders (to me anyway) in quite an old fashioned 'painterly' way, unlike clinically supersharp modern lenses. It has 'character' (sniggers with pretention, sounds like a wine snob talking).
This lens is part of the rebirth of my own photography (LOL - the genius and rivalry) and I like the different way this aging lens renders. It is even older than the Nikon F2 (a mere half century) to which it is not inappropriately attached.
Film - Ilford FP4+, Ilford Ilfotec HC 1+31 8mins.
I'm not sure I want to use FP4+ again, I'm getting superstitious about it.