Rollei Retro 400S – tim dobbs photography

I have shot a few rolls of Rollei Retro 400 and love how you get really deep blacks while holding shadow detail and especially in 120 format how much detail it produces.

A few weeks back it was pretty gloomy with quite a bit of mist here in the valley which screams Black and White to me so I loaded up my Fuji GW690iii and went for a walk up to the site of the last colliery to close here in the Garw valley.

The landscape has long been transformed since the mines went and on the site are 2 lovely lakes.

As the Fuji only takes 8 frames and I didn’t bring any more film with me I had to be selective with my shots trying not to waste any.

So these 8 frames are my walk from the commemorative plaque at the entrance to the site, then the bottom lake & Sculpture followed by the lovely top lake surrounded by mist.

This type of image works well with Rollei Retro in my opinion and I was pleased to have got 8 keepers from the roll.

So here are the images … comments most welcome

Click to view larger ….

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Over the last few months I have shot a few rolls of Rollei’s RPX range which I really liked the look of.

So a few weeks back I was trying to decide what film to shoot that day and came across a roll of Retro 400S which I have shot once before and was not really that happy with how the roll came out developed in Rodinal.

I checked the Massive dev chart app and saw that I could also develop it in ilfotecHC so I thought I would give it a go and compare it to the RPX 400 and the previous roll.

I have been trying to post complete rolls of film recently and this was my plan for this one but whilst out on my walk my Pentax Super A sort of developed a problem.

Nearly every time that I half pressed the shutter to activate the meter nothing happened so I was trying to press the shutter button at different angles with my finger until it worked.

The problem was that on a few occasions I fired the damn shutter giving either totally blurred/black or over exposed frames so this roll only had 31 keeper which you can see here.

I have since used the Super A again and have found that I need to rest my finger towards the front of the shutter button for a second or two and the meter activates every time now.

By using ilfotecHC rather than Rodinal the images were far more like what I have seen on the interwebs … Great Blacks, contrasty and sharp with highlights that didn’t blow out and a really nice grain.

My 1st roll seemed muddy and excessively grainy so if I buy anymore of this stock it will be getting souped in ilfotecHC for sure.

So here are the images … comments most welcome