B&W – tim dobbs photography

ilford Ortho Plus pushed to 400 by accident but I think it worked … the whole roll

I have shot ilford Ortho plus in 120 format before and really loved how it looks.

Sharp as a tack and very little grain with great dynamic range.

This roll that I shot in my Mamiya RB67 over Christmas was a total accident.

I received a few rolls of film from my better half as a present as usual namely a few different Lomography films in 35mm and 120 format one of which I have never shot before … Lady Grey 400

My plan was to take out the RB67 and for some reason I thought the Lady Grey was in 120 format so when I went to get it out of the fridge I realised it was 35mm so a little disappointed and not wanting to take out an SLR I grabbed the roll next to it which was the Ortho.

Problem was it was in my mind I was going to shoot 400 iso film so I set my meter to 400 before getting the film so obviously when I swapped to the Ortho I forgot to change the light meter and went out on our little walk happily shooting away thinking I had 400 loaded.

When I got home and unloaded the roll I immediately realised my mistake and promptly jumped on the interwebs looking for any info I could find about developing times for Ortho plus when pushed to 400.

I could not seem to find out much as obviously there was no one as dull as me and made this error so after a few twitter chats I decided to process in Rodinal 1+100 dilution Stand development for 1 1/2 hours with 2 inversions( I rotated with stick actually) at start then every 30 minutes and crossed my fingers that something was salvageable.

To my surprise then I opened the tank the negatives looked perfect so I hung them ups and waited to dry.

After scanning the only slight problem that I noticed was some of the highlights had blown just a little bit which must have been down to the stand development most probably (this was my 1st time trying this method).

The highlights blowing didn’t really bother me and the sharpness and reasonable grain surprised me.

I would not recommend doing this everyday as I feel I was pretty lucky this time but it was an interesting experiment (accident) and shows just how good ilford Ortho Plus is.

Anyway here is the whole roll .. click to view larger

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek

20 minute walk with some ilford HP5 and my Yashicamat 124G …..

I have had my iMac for about 6 months and it has been great for everything especially photo editing in Adobe Lightroom in 4k but since the Big Sur update it has been running like a snail in treacle with all the Adobe products.

I used to edit using a PC which was starting to slow down a bit which is why I upgraded to a new 6 core, 4k iMac so in a fit of extreme recklessness I went and bought a new PC 2 weeks ago (gave my PC to my son so I don’t feel that guilty) and I wanted to test it out so loaded my Yashicamat with some trusty HP5 and went out to bang off 12 frames just to test my workflow from scanning to editing.

Considering I shot the roll in only 10 minutes I was pleased to get 12 keepers albeit very similar shots.

The PC performed brilliantly without a hitch very fast and smooth and a little easier on the eye as my PC monitor is a 28inch 4k compared with my iMac 21.5inch 4k.

Apple has since given an update to Big Sur which still has done nothing to speed up Adobe stuff so I feel a complete wipe and clean install coming over Christmas.

Anyway here are the 12 frames sorry there is not a lot of variety other than slightly different framing and apertures.

As per usual HP5 looked lovely and the Yashicamat gave excellent sharp images.

Click and image to view larger …

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek

Shooting long expired Original Agfa Scala 200 slide film ….

I have been trying to sort out my negative filing today and came across a roll of Agfa Scala 200 that I shot last year and had it processed by Silverpan film lab.

The film was given to me and was long expired obviously and I didn’t have a clue how it had been stored so I was not confident on how it would come out or even if it would work at all.

I decided to shoot it using my Leica M2 and exposed it at 100 iso which in hindsight was not even close, I should have gone for 50 iso or even lower.

Anyway when the positives came back it was still a thrill to see B&W slides for the first time even if they were very underexposed and some of the frames were totally unusable.

Thanks to Epson scan and Lightroom I managed to salvage quite a few frames and was very pleased with what I got so much so I have bought a few rolls of the Adox Scala film to try.

So here are the frames that I ended up with …

Click on an image to view larger … comments most welcomed