University of Washington

Early on a Saturday morning, Lily and I set out for the UW campus. I wanted to try and do a little architecture work, despite being ill-prepared with only a 50mm lens on my Nikon. Shortly after arriving we bumped into a retired professor - I can’t exactly remember what he had taught, but it was definitely something to do with geopolitics.

Regardless, he proceeded to fill our ears with conspiracy theories about how Russia has the world’s largest untapped supply of fresh water. Lake Baikal, of course, is not untapped. There was a paper mill on it for 40 years or so which discharged waste directly into the lake, and the lake itself is a popular tourist spot. It is also roughly 80% of the volume of the Great Lakes added up - not exactly likely to swing the balance between the east and west. He also asserted that the Great Lakes were “dead”, and as someone who has eaten fish out of the Detroit river (note that I do NOT recommend this) I found the assertion odd.

That about sums it up - Odd. It was a pleasantly odd encounter. You know how in GTA IV you could just find random, anonymous people in the game that would send you on wild side-quests? That isn’t contrived for the sake of gameplay - that’s how people are, sometimes. I love it.

Oh yeah, the photos. My objective for this trip was to play around with spot metering. However, I probably should have left it on center-weighted because sometimes I forgot that I was on spot-metering and exposed for the sky, blowing out the rest of the frame. Also, it doesn’t really seem like I need to use spot-metering, at least not with HP5+. This film stock seems to have really good.. “exposure latitude” I think is the phrase?

An example - I took two exposures of the building and tree through the bars of the foyer (the first image here). One, I spot metered for the sun on the building, and the other I metered for the shadows inside the foyer. When scanned using my digitizing setup, they both turned out identical. It seems that unless I get the exposure really wrong (exposing for the sky), HP5+ just takes it like a champ. Good to know, I guess.

An orange filter would have helped with a lot of these shots. The daylight was really strong and the sky was pretty much clear.

This roll was shot at box speed (400) and developed in Caffenol-H, using the same recipe as the roll I shot in Edmonds (albeit with a more accurate scale). The Edmonds roll was 15min at ?? degrees celsius (didn’t have a thermometer), and this roll was 12 minutes at 22 degrees celsius. My last roll turned out really over-developed, so I was aiming for 13 minutes instead. This time was quoted as an alternative in the f/138 blogpost I used as a reference. I took off an extra minute for the extra temperature.

This yielded significantly better results than 15 minutes. I have no idea where people are quoting 15 minutes of development for 400 speed film in Caffenol-H from - it feels like significantly more than is needed. I might try my next roll at 11 minutes and see how it turns out - I still feel that some of these shots are still just a bit over-developed, but it might just be exposure failures on my part.