family ride

I have now finished editing all the pictures from my last development run of Argentina pictures and I’m quite pleased with the results. There are some quirky, funny and beautiful things in the lot and I look forward to showing them to you. However, I also still have a number of rolls from my other trip to show you still and I also want to keep the black and white and colour balanced for now. Pretty much all the Argentina pictures were taken on colour film, which was quite a gutsy move, if I may say so. My experience with colour is limited and black and white suits my style of shooting more. However, shooting on colour film obviously has the advantage that I can now choose whether to keep the shots in colour or convert them to black and white, so the risk involved actually only the development. Since I’m still only halfway through the rolls after 4 months I obviously had some problems with that part, but they are finally solved now.

I still don’t think that colour works so well for my kind of street photography, so by now I’m shooting mostly black and white again, but every now and then I throw in a roll of colour for a project or for testing purposes. I still have 3 rolls of Portra 400 and one roll of Velvia 100 for the Rollei, and a couple of rolls of Agfa Precisa CT 100 for the Leica. There are also a few rolls of Kodak Gold 200 for the beach in my Canon Sureshot WP-1 and still 10 rolls of the Kodak Farbwelt 400 in the freezer. I’ll continue with colour and maybe I’ll even shoot another full trip on it, but it’s very likely that most of the final prints will end up being in black and white anyway. Why shoot colour then? Well, with the right kind of subject matter and the right film stock colour definitely can have its place in my work. It won’t be regular street most likely, but for projects and landscape stuff it will find its way into my workflow.

The roll I’m showing you today is rather unrelated to all of that and from my last trip to Germany. However, it was actually an experiment too, so it fits to my ramblings anyway. After having excellent results with cold Caffenol-CL and Double-X with greatly reduced grain I wanted to see whether the same technique also worked for Kentmere 400. My verdict is: No, it doesn’t work. The only thing it does is to increase the risk of surge marks, which I also notice with Double-X. With Kentmere 400 I only got the bad and none of the good though. The grain was just like I would have expected with this film in standard Caffenol-CL. Next time I shoot a Kentmere style film – I’ll go with 20°C Caffenol-CL again or maybe try some rotary processing for a change.

All pictures taken with: Leica M6, Zeiss ZM C-Biogon 35mm f/2.8.
Kentmere 400 stand-developed in cold Caffenol-CL.