JCH Streetpan at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

¡Ay, dolor! (Oh, pain!), as the mariachi singers exclaim in jocular fashion as they sing their songs of tragedy and desire. That was in part my reaction yesterday when I saw these negatives. 

I finally got around to developing a few 120 rolls of black and white film. I used to take them to the lab, but I don't want to spend so much money ($5 per roll) doing so anymore when I have the equipment. The only thing was that I was nervous about loading the negatives onto the reels, remembering as I did my disastrous attempts to do so all those years ago (in 2000) in Berkeley when I was developing my film at the photo facility there. I screwed up a roll trying to wind it onto a steel reel and since then, I had decided it was too much of a pain.

This time, I used my plastic reels, set them to the right size and used my dark bag to load them. It was a pain again, but not so much. With practice I will get better. The real pain was seeing these negatives.

This is a roll of JCH Streetpan, taken from my trip about two weeks ago to the Santa Barbara Garden. (What I remember most was the five hour plus drive there and back, it was exhausting.) I developed in Kodak chemicals, but my developer might have been exhausted. I had used it before last week to develop some 4x5 frames and also an 8x10 negative. Next time I develop 120, I will make sure I am using fresh chemicals. I am beginning to suspect my fixer as well.

The negative was very, very thin. This surprised me, because it had been so bright at the garden. I was using my R72 filter, but I adjusted exposure down to 1/15 (or 1/30th) of a second. The skies came out virtually jet black, there were no clouds, it was one of those pitiless, cloudless days, but the drama was in the plants, not the skies, and their arrangements.

So, so thin, that was my reaction to seeing the negatives. There was hardly an image there, it seemed. I will really struggle to bring it out when I scan it.

This is the magnificent meadow scene that wow visitors when they first enter the garden. I certainly got the foreground in IR effect, but I guess those trees in the back are not the type that reflect IR light. Also, I can barely make out the mountains in the back against that black sky.

Here is a scene that I shot just as a secondary composition, with no real hopes. I actually liked it very much. The trick when using IR, I am finding, is to look for those juxtapositions of plants and foliage with framing objects. Use the black shapes to highlight the white leaves. This was just a rock arrangement, and the shrubs in back were basically dark, they didn't reflect much IR. The rocks are set off, though.

Finally, I think this is the water awareness cottage. The IR effect is very, very minimal in the plants. Either they were the wrong kind or there wasn't enough IR light. I could have done much better with this composition.

So, two rolls yesterday of 120 film that I developed at home. From now on, I am doing all my 120 black and white film. The Streetpan didn't do so well for IR, but there are a couple of variables to take into account, not only conditions as the scene and the selection of the wrong type of plants, but also, my development at home and the fact I used an exhausted developer that had turned yellow. I'll try again, maybe, today.