Friday, February 10, 2023

Mummy 400 in the Dragon 30

In order to convince myself that the scratches in some recent negatives were the result of a bad batch of Arista.edu 200 and nothing to do with my camera, another roll of a rebranded Foma film, Film Photography Project's Mummy 400, went into the Dragon 30. Sounds like Game of Thrones meets Boris Karloff.

Out to the lakeshore to take advantage of a dramatic partly cloudy day. Some amateur club has prepared a small area near the T-dock with a hockey rink and several oval tracks which intersect to mark this spot with an X.


This off-shore crack formed an S-curve, but the wide angle kind of hides that. 


On the way home, I stopped at Beck's Meats for some local Andouille and eight-year-old cheddar. The young man who helped me had never heard of pinhole photography.



A light but blustery snowfall dusted Fluffy's lounge chair on the lanai.



It blew all the way to cover the chair by Fluffy's personal entrance.



A basket and the sewing machine treadle under the snow,.



I must have framed this intending to use the axial pinhole but got distracted by workers having a conversation just out of view inside. The exposure ended up being made with the upper pinhole instead.



They shoveled part of Miller's Bay for the Fisheree and Polar Plunge.



Side by side bridges over the lagoon inlet.



The back door, patio and tenant's stairway behind Oblio's.



The overhead door to the back bar where U-Club is held.



The Dragon 30 has hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above the axis, 3cm from a 6cm x 6cm frame. The Mummy 400 was semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

I used Rodinal because there's a concern about background fogging of high-speed films in caffenol despite my use of 10g/l of salt as a restrainer. This bottle of Rodinal is very old, more than two years. My uses of Rodinal in that time were done with a newer bottle. These negatives were mostly exposed in what that data sheet that used to come with your film would describe as "Bright or hazy sun in sand or snow." At F133, the exposures measured much less than my poor hand can wave a black card away from the pinhole and back. They could probably use a little low-contrast developer so I gave the old bottle a try.

Look at this stuff. It looks like dark corn syrup. It's backlit with my bike light in this photo. Even at a dilution of 1:100, the negatives came out completely normal. Sort of appropriately for the Mummy film, Rodinal lives forever.

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