The Whole Roll – First Snow in November – Switzerland on pushed Kentmere Pan 400

The first snow came in early this year in late November, and everybody was excited. It’s an event, when grown-up adults feel as excited as they were back in the days of childhood. Usually the first snow of the year is also the “most photographed”.

I woke up early in the morning, opened up my window and saw the amount of snow that fell overnight. It was still dark, and I wanted to take at least a few snaps in low light before heading into office. I opened my fridge and had a look for B+W film stocks with at least 400 ISO, that I possibly could push one stop to 800. Choices were T-Max400 or Kentmere Pan400. I planned to use Rodinal diluted to 1:100 in Stand Development, which is why I chose Kentmere over T-Max. I found that Rodinal works best with “classic” Grain structure instead of T-Grain.

I loaded up my Pentax 67 II which had the 55mm/f4 lens on it. I personally love that camera/lens combo, it gives quite wide-angled shots, and the lens produces sharp images even wide-open. (Nearly all Pentax 67 SMC lenses produce excellent sharp images wide-open)
I set ISO to 800 and off I was.

Leaving the house, I first realized the amount of snow on our sidewalk lightings. Difficult to meter, I measured at the pole of the light, which gave me 1/30s at f4.
When I arrived at the train station, I took another shot at f4 of the snow-covered platform and its lightings. Again, it was quite difficult to meter and I had to take the shot at 1/8s handheld. So much to the myth of mirror-slap on my beloved Pentax 67.

The other pictures were all taken during (overcast) daylight as I was shooting around my office as well as by the local river “Limmat“ which source is lake Zurich.
As mentioned, I developed the film in Rodinal, highly diluted to 1+100. That’s just 5ml Rodinal on 500ml of water. In the past, I did “semi-stand-development”, which means agitating once at half of the total development time. This time I did a real stand-development, only agitating at the start for 10 seconds and then leaving it standing for 2 hours. I usually take development times from the “Massive Dev Chart” over at digitaltruth (Link), which gives good results in most cases.

How do I like the results?

I think Kentmere films are pretty versatile for their price and give good results at box speed. Even pushed one stop to 800 ISO, the images still look quite good. Contrast is quite high, as expected, grain didn’t get too extreme, even with Rodinal, which usually gives a bit “grainier” negatives.
I noticed some cloudy parts on some negatives, covering parts of the right side of the image. I suspect it could be the result of not having the film agitated such a long time during development.

Other than that, it was a great joy to shoot (and carry the brick of a camera) Pentax in early winter conditions, off to the next experiment with black and white film… Next time, I’d like to test out the holy grail of Black and White developers – 510 Pyro.

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