Kentmere 400 in Rodinal, 1:50, plus some new lenses/cameras

Had some time to kill yesterday during my lunch break so I strolled around the Fine Arts building on campus and tested out some new lenses and a new camera. I just got in a few classic manual-focus Nikkor lenses along with a really nice F (Nikon's first SLR) as well as a beautiful black Nikkormat EL. The Nikkormat has a TTL meter which is really nice for casual snapshooting, which I like to do on occasion just to get out and shooting some photos.

The lenses I got included a 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor-S pre-AI, a 135mm f/3.5 pre-AI, and the cult-classic 85mm f/1.8 AI lens. I quick check on my digital cameras showed this old design clearly superior optically to my newer AF-D model. While the AF-D lens has obvious spherical aberrations wide-open down to about f/2.5, the old AI lens is sharp and contrasty right from the get-go at f/1.8. The only bummer is the 6-bladed iris which creates really distracting bokeh, but I can deal with that.

The Nikkormat is a cute camera that is nice and small for easy portability. It's the smallest 35mm camera I have that still has a TTL meter.

Here are some of the snapshots from this roll. This Kentmere film I believe is actually repackaged Ilford Delta 400 film. Regardless, I really didn't like the results with Rodinal. Tri-X + Rodinal is clearly superior, but I had this roll kicking around so I decided to try it. I shot the roll at 200 ASA. The Rodinal was diluted 1:50, and I developed the film for 9:30 at 22 degrees C. It was definitely under-developed though, and probably a little overexposed.

I don't know if anyone would particularly care, but I might start doing little mini-review of lenses and cameras as individual blog posts, similar to what I wrote above about the 85mm AI lens, but with more details and example photos. If that's something you would like to see let me know!