Half Frame Silliness Continues
Kodak H35N + Arista 400 in Ilfotec HC
Yesterday, in a short walk that ended eventfully when a hailstorm broke loose from the sky above us, I finished off the second roll through the H35N. This roll saw a walk in a local network of trails, some moments around the house, and a couple walks around the neighborhood.
This time I had opted to shoot some of the Arista 400 that I had initially purchased with the camera. And instead of opting for the Rodinal stand dev I gambled on souping in Ilfotec HC for the standard dev time for Arista shot at box speed. I could definitely tell that the stand dev had helped to compensate for when the fixed exposure on the H35N wasn’t quite up to snuff for a given scene. There were some pretty severely underexposed negatives on this roll, and I’m not sure that they would have been so horribly underexposed after an hour long bath in Rodinal. But! There is still an interesting aesthetic to underexposed negatives, right…? I will say, however, that underexposure aside I do appreciate the less grainy results from HC. It does lend itself to a more pleasant looking negative when there is enough exposure there.
I also opted for the scanning technique that I talked about in the last post. Instead of scanning the entire 35mm frame and having to end up with a suboptimal scan of two half frame negatives which I then had to spend time splitting up in post, I scanned each half frame image individually in Silverfast. This had two benefits. I was able to tailor the scanning settings to each individual image rather than having to find a balance that often meant the incorrect settings for both images. It also cut out a lot of the tedium of the post process work of trying to 1) correct for the poor initial scans, and 2) prevented the need to have to copy and crop every image to get down to single half frame photos.
I initially expected this scanning technique to take much longer but it didn’t really lengthen the process that much. If I’m really on a roll scanning 35mm film I can usually knock out a roll of film in a little under an hour. Scanning in the half frame scanning individual images only took me about an hour and a half, which is a time cost I’m definitely willing to eat given just how much better the end results were this time around.
Enough rambling! Here’s a small collection of images off the most recent roll
