52@52 Week 23
I finally made it down to Seaside Heights last weekend. Took the monorail, some New55 P/N ISO 50, and a film holder with two sheets of Tri-X TXP 320. Here are the results of the New55.
One of the three New55 shots I took exhibited the "too loose" syndrome I’ve mentioned before and overexposed. The other two shots I took both exhibited signs of faulty popping of developer pods.
I have gotten into the habit of taking control shots with Tri-X whenever I shoot New55, even though their ISOs are different. I developed the Tri-X tonight, because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t my saggy bellows getting in the way. I was pretty sure it wasn’t, particularly because the two New55 shots show incompleteness on different sides, but I wanted to be certain. It was not the bellows. I looked at the pods after I developed the New55, and it was clear that they didn’t completely open. One side did, one side did not, or did not completely open.
I see shots from other people online with this film that work better. I checked my holder before I loaded it, and it was clean, so I don’t think the holder was to blame.
I’m enjoying trying this film out, but I am also frustrated that I’m not getting better results.
I have another box, and I expect that it won’t be too long before I receive the two boxes from my Kickstarter pledge; I was somewhere around 45% in the list of backers, and Sam and Bob say they’ve shipped 50% of the rewards. Obviously the earlier pledges were for more boxes than later pledges, because otherwise I would have received my Kickstarter boxes by now. Note that I’m not complaining about that. I’m happy to pay for boxes and help the company through this early period. And the film has definitely gotten better. I look forward to continuing to shoot with it, but I’m also going to continue shooting backups with other film.
I should post scans of the prints from these two here. I find that the prints from the ISO 50 film are pretty awful. The prints from the ISO 100/200 film were much better. But I think the negatives on the ISO 50 are a little better, my issues with pod problems notwithstanding.
Posted at 9:23 PM