Bill Smith's Photography

This past Friday night I got a chance to get back into the darkroom for a print making session. I printed Crossing Wellington on Ilford Multigrade IV Matt fibre paper and Brookfield Place on Ilford's RC Pearl. What I struggled with for ages before switching to Kentmere was I was having the hardest time getting decent blacks out of Ilford paper regardless if it was RC or FB. I found by opening up the enlarger lens from F8 to 5.6 and shortening the exposure time under the enlarger head I got magic.

Playing Around With Different Film I am by and large a Kodak Tri-x/Ilford HP5 kind of guy for 120 format film. I do shoot slower once in a while but for most applications I stick to a 400ISO film and play around with it. Now for a bit of a change I picked up a half dozen rolls of Fomapan 400 under the Arista.EDU Ultra label from Freestyle Photographic out of LA. I have used their slower speed films (Fomapan 100 and 200) in 35mm with great results but I wanted to try something a little bigger and I really like the results. I shot the first roll at 250 ISO and processed in Rodinal 1+50 for 11 minutes at 20c and got the sharp results below. I plan to print this negative this weekend to see what I get enlarged on paper. I took this down by the lake in Old Oakville with a Rolleiflex Series E 3.5.