More portraits and a couple 8x10 sheets

I finally got around to finishing up these portrait scans. These are the shots I mentioned in a recent post that were really underexposed but saved by using Acufine developer. Both were taken with my converted Polaroid and 135mm Xenotar lens.

First is a shot of a dancer. I made a dumb mistake and had my meter set to 3200 ISO, instead of 100. This was an egregious error, a 5-stop underexposure. Despite this, the negative was usable but not great:

I was still working with Acufine to figure out how best to utilize it. With a little more experimentation I took this negative that was also underexposed by 4 stops and it looks almost normal. On the Acufine packaging it mentions to not agitate too much. I don't know the mechanics of why this matters, but I found that simply setting the negative in the developer and only agitating slightly at first and then at 30 minutes worked perfectly (a total of 1 hour in the developer). Here is the result:

I printed it in my darkroom tonight and it came out pretty well. It's not perfect but better than nothing.

I also had time this past weekend to shoot some 8x10 sheets. Here are the results. I shot my typical green-sensitive x-ray film. This first shot was with a Wollensak 159mm super-wide angle lens:

This one was shot with a Gundlach Triple-Convertible lens that is a 12" lens with both elements or either a 21" or 28" lens with the individual elements. This one was at 12":

Still simply learning about this x-ray film and its properties. 8x10 is fun to shoot just for kicks. That is probably strange but at the end of the day the per-sheet cost of this x-ray film is only $0.25, much less than my standard 4x5 film, so it's great not to worry so much about costs!