Withlacoochee back to normal...for now

The river area around Langdale Park is finally back to normal. The road is even dry and not washed out as it has been for the better part of a year. Of course, late summer 2013 is when the flooding started to happen, so this might not last.

I was able to hike back pretty far into the wilderness. The floodplains are just huge vats of mud. It's a little difficult to get around without slipping or sinking into some of these areas.

I took my Pentax 67 and 55mm f/4 and 105mm f/2.4 lenses out and shot these images:

 

 

 

Staining Developer Tests Continue

I don't know what it is, but staining developers just don't work well for me.

So many people extol the virtues of Pyrocat and other staining developers (and have great work to show for it) but I've never had much success. I must have some really alkali water or something, causing the high 1:1:100 dilution to falter.

I gave a different developer a chance though, called Tanol. It's a much lesser-known one. I'm even less happy with it right now. I developed a couple of films now with just awful results. Terrible base fog, almost no density at all either, and ridiculous edge effects making the film look hyper-sharpened and ugly.

I think the edge effects might do better with larger format films (I was shooting 35mm) but I'm going to have to rate ISO 400 films at like 50-100 considering the low density! And develop it for an hour with semi-stand. Well, that's the next test, anyway. I actually developed one set of 4x5 negatives with this stuff and they turned out okay. Still looking for the best 400-speed film in 35mm for scenic, outdoor stuff. Tri-X is just too grainy for me and I continue to be kind of "meh" to T-Max 400 for some reason.

Anyway, here's a couple of the "passable" frames: