Returning to home developing – an expired roll of FP4 and perhaps a Pen EE

Ibraar Hussain recently posted a review of a Chinon CE-4 and his experiences with it which I found very interesting. So interesting that a few days later a house-clearance, untested, CE4-S with Chinon’s own 50mm 1:1.9 lens was on its way from eBay. What can I say? I’m easily lead. My luck was in as my example is near-mint and has obviously always had a skylight filter fitted so the lens is spotless. I changed the light-seals on the film door which I was impressed to see can be removed just by sliding a small catch. The next thing was to decide what film to shoot. At this point I remembered I had four rolls of 36-shot Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow 400ASA that I bought three years ago through a Kickstarter for £20. Another impulse buy. We had my sister staying with us for a few days so we had the perfect excuse to take a tour of the Lake District where we live and fire off the 36 frames.

I’ve recently had a couple of not entirely satisfactory experiences getting my black & white film developed so I though it was time I got back into the chemical side of things. Fifty-plus years ago I used to do all my own developing and printing in my mother’s fully equipped darkroom but since the advent of digital cameras I’ve always outsourced that pleasure. And I’ve just been reminded what a pleasure it is.

A number of contributors here, notably Geoff Chaplin, have done some exhaustive tests using Rodinal so not wanting to reinvent the wheel I ordered some and some Adofix Plus from the ever-reliable Bristol Cameras who promptly rang me up to ask if they could send the nature-identical Compard R09 instead. Fair enough. Now where is my UN-brand changing bag?

And my Paterson Universal Tank:

I will not bore you with the procedure as I’m sure many of you have done it frequently. What I did do however is work out the cost:

12ml of R09 at £15.50 per 500ml = 37p
37ml of Adofix at £11.50 = 86p
Grand total = £1.23

Here are some of the pictures I like the best from this reel:

Apart from some water spots on the non-emulsion side of the film which I had to carefully polish off I was very happy with that experiment. But what about the FP4? I hear you cry. Bear with me, here is the story. About five years ago I found a reel of 35mm FP4 in one of my camera bags, in its plastic pot, and I saw that the leader had been wound inside. Assuming it had been exposed I took it to our local camera shop and photo-processor. Unfortunately they were not very cooperative, not really interested in B&W, and fobbed me off with tales of hand-developing and waiting lists so I was discouraged somewhat and the film went back into storage. With my newly restored enthusiasm for chemicals, and realising how cheap the experiment would be, it was into the changing bag again.

This time I did a final rinse with water from our dehumidifier, reasoning it would be mineral-free, and no water spots can be seen.

To my surprise it was obvious, even before I started scanning, that the roll had been taken with a half-frame camera. The only half-frame I’ve owned, until a son bought me the latest Kodak H35, was an Olympus Pen EE and I haven’t seen that for decades. I expect I sold it but have no recollection of doing so.

In about 1979 we bought a second-hand car garage and turned it into an electrical repair workshop. The photographs on this roll are of the building work undertaken to replace corrugated walls with concrete blocks. They have been sitting undeveloped for at least 44 years. To me – fascinating. To you – probably not so much, but here are a few:

Thank you for your indulgence, and thank you to the contributors to this site for motivating me back into home processing.

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