This was the inaugural roll of film through my new (to me) Canon AT-1. It’s not a very exciting camera, having only shutter-priority or full manual exposure, and a fairly inaccurate match-needle meter. Nonetheless, its procurement was necessary for me to complete my collection of the Canon A series and there’s nothing I hate more than an unused camera – so I used it!
I loaded the AT-1 with a roll of Ilford FP4+ with a box speed of ISO 125, although I usually rate it at ISO 100. However, I accidentally left the meter dial set to ISO 800. It gets even worse – some of the pictures I decided to meter using the Sunny 16 rule, so those were exposed at ISO 100. I had flipped back and forth between the metering styles throughout the roll. I realised my mistake before processing the film, so I had the opportunity to minimise the badness during development.
I decided to process the film as ISO 200, hopefully getting a reasonable compromise between the ISO 100 and ISO 800 shots. On top of that, I developed with a dilute batch of Microphen, itself a low-contrast developer. This should make the extremities of the exposure slightly less extreme. After developing, the ISO 800 shots were quite thin, so I cut the film up to separate the the ISO 800 shots from the rest, and then intensified them in a selenium toner to increase the density a bit.
The result is a set of fairly thin, fairly low contrast negatives that would be tricky to print optically in the darkroom. However, with the magic of a decent scanner and careful tweaking of the curves in GIMP, I’ve ended up with a set of reasonable scans.
With careful film handling, it is possible to get reasonable images. The flowers were exposed at ISO 100, the tree carving and sun rays were exposed at ISO 400 and the cat and church were exposed at ISO 800. The selenium toner did not affect the colour of the negatives, only the density. The sepia effect was added digitally after scanning.
Lenses used were a Canon FD 100mm f/4 macro for the flowers, Canon FD 135mm f/2.8 for the cat and sun rays, and Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 for the church and tree carving.
Jonathan Gazeley 