Chasing results

Chasing results

Did you see what I did there? I’m writing this while the strip of 35mm film I’ve run through Janet’s Kodak Hawkeye is hanging up to dry, and I plan to scan it and post some images with this blog within a couple of hours.

The first impressions are that the results are really good for a box camera: the negatives have a pleasing crispness. Of course they don’t match my Contax or Leica negatives (or even those form my 1937 Leica IIIa), but they’re not bad at all. You have to remember the curved film path (see the last image in my 5 September blog for an indication of how the film is curved) helps minimise the effects of a simple lens with a curved field, though only along the length of the frame. Roll film will only curve in one direction at a time, just like a sheet of paper or card, and as the frame is longer than it is wide, that’s the way to go.

I’ll only find out about corner definition when my two rolls of Rera Pan 100S (no. I’ve not heard of it before either) arrive. I’m glad to say that the digitaltruth website’s Great Big Developing Chart has heard of it, and provides developing times for plenty of different developers, including Rodinal, which is a bit of a favourite of mine.

In these days of exposure precision, where our meters are calibrated in tenths of a stop, a camera with a single shutter speed and a fixed aperture seems a perverse idea. But film’s pretty resilient stuff: it will take a good deal of overexposure before it just gives up. Remember, the Hawkeye was made back in the Thirties, when a film speed of around 20 ISO would have been considered quite fast… Even though ISO was not even a gleam in a standard-writer’s eye… So in bright light, modern film will be overexposed, and there should still be something going on in cloudy dull conditions…