Saturday, March 26, 2011

Caffenol, Flash, & Neopan400 @ 1600EI


It's been about a week since I did anything with my ongoing Caffenol experimentations. Yesterday I loaded up another roll of Neopan400 and shot it indoor at 1600EI with a flash. The film was developed using the same Caffenol C-L formula and stand processed for 75 minutes.

I'm not sure just how I like it with the higher key lighting and fill flash -still thinking about it I suppose. The grain started to show up, and the sharpness dropped off a bit while the tonal graduation also suffered a bit compared to the same push in Xtol.

Overall, the end result is acceptable, but not stellar like the low-key lighting I previously shot. The low-key results were amazing to me, whereas this I think shows some limitation. Perhaps limitation isn't the best description of these results. I mean after all, this is a two stop push for the film, and anytime you underexpose by two stops quality begins to fall off.




In the photo of the child there are bright whites, but the skin tones didn't produce the same as the photo of the man. I think that is mainly the fault of the indirect fill flash judging by the photo above where the knit cap has brilliant high-key tones.


Sometimes when testing a film/developer combination the result can be confusing. There have been times when I have been confused by the reaction the tested film/developer combination has responded to different lighting situations. With this film/developer combination I received some of that confusion. The snapshots of family were taken indoor with flash, and the results are pretty similar.



Today we had a nice little snow storm roll through, and so I loaded up another short roll to see how this combination would react to the high-key snow and ambient lighting. Now we lean back towards the stellar end of the spectrum with this combination and push speed. I almost couldn't believe how well it held the high-key tones, lack of visible grain, and still produced nice low-key tones. I am impressed with the sharpness of this scene in ambient light. That's pretty sharp for a 400 speed film pushed to 1600. The photograph is of my Tiger Lily beds that started to spring up last week when the temps were 70 degrees.



I think Neopan400 does quite well in Caffenol, and I will continue to use this combination in the future. Now I need to start testing some other films with Caffenol....

1 comment:

  1. wow, impressive. I'm way behind you on the experimentation in the darkroom, but I did try push processing last night (1 stop) and was really happy with the effect. I definitely want to try Caffenol sometime! I'm impressed with the clarity of tones that were produced indoors too.

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