Edmonds on HP5

After Seattle Pride on the 30th of June, I sent off the two rolls of Fuji 400 I finished to be processed, put some Ilford HP5 in the Nikon, and went to Edmonds on a sunny evening.

My local film lab (Kenmore Camera) doesn’t do black and white processing - this meant I was on my own for developing this roll. Thankfully black & white film developing is easy enough to do yourself at home. After a bit of research I discovered “Caffenol” - a film developer created from common household chemicals and instant coffee. I thought it would be a fun way to get into DIY developing. It also happens to be a lot less…problematic to dispose of down the drain.

I used this blog post on f/138 as a guide. It helped clear up a couple things, mainly what to subsitute for Potassium Bromide when processing higher-speed film as it’s not easily available at retail stores in the UK (or the US, it seems).

I used a development time of 14 minutes, and fixing time of 4 minutes using Ilford Rapid Fixer in 1+4 dilution. Note that I didn’t list a temperature - it’s been really warm here and I didn’t have a thermometer handy. It’s safe to say that the room temperature was well above the 20C suggested by Daniel’s blog post, and that my solution was also above that. Daniel’s post quoted a development time of 15 minutes, but seemed to suggest that this was a low-ball.

Based on that feeling I took a minute off but the results ended up with very strong contrast - seemingly over-developed. Like, this is box-speed HP5. Not that I’ve ever shot it before, but it’s my understanding that it’s not known for not being the most contrast-y film. These frames, however… I pretty much had to spike the contrast slider down to negative 60 or 70 to recover any detail from the shadows whatsoever. I guess this could be a “I have no idea how to meter shots on film” issue too, but I’m more inclined to blame the results of my Breaking Bad cosplay.

Really strong grain in these shots. It’s a vibe, though.