If there’s one thing I know, I’ve tended to be silent on this blog about my love for Spring and for all that is floral.

Nope.

I never post about how much I can’t wait for the flowers to come out or for it to be sunny.

😶

😶

☺️🌷

This weekend marked the beginning of the annual Tulip Festival, which has been held annually since 1953, and instead of avoiding the crowds that gather at Dow’s Lake, Kathleen and I decided that it would be fun to throw ourselves into them headlong.

Since the weather was quite nice – sunny and a high of 18℃ – we decided that we’d walk instead of taking transit. Of course, as has become tradition we made a bit of an adventure of it with a stop in at Ten Toes, where I had a macadamia maple latte and Kathleen had an iced black tea, which we took to go.

Dow’s Lake was crowded, as we expected. And so was its nearest neighbourhood, Little Italy. And so was Centretown. And come to think of it, so was Chinatown. It’s the kickoff for Ottawa’s tourist season, and no matter how long I’ve lived here, it seems to come as a surprise every year.

What about the “test”?

Since I did not exactly trust that we would enjoy the company of the sunshine as forecasted – but wanted to try something new in photo-making – I decided that this would be the weekend that I would try ECN-2 development. It also didn’t hurt that I am out of my favourite C-41 chemistry and have a small collection of Vision3 250D in the fridge. The time seemed right!

As you might see from some of the photos above, my first time developing cinema film was not without its challenges:

1. I ended up with green discolouration on some of the frames not dissimilar to the discolouration I got from the simplified C-41 kit I tried last Summer;
2. The inversions necessary for development needed to be a little more vigorous than I use for black-and-white or C-41 development. Something like I use for E-6 development. While I was able to correct for much of it while scanning, it came out of the tank quite thin.
3. Scanning is a bit less breezy than it is for common films like Gold or ColorPlus and requires a more active process of colour correction. Something that does not come naturally to me!

Fortunately, since I chose to develop the rolls separately, I was able to identify and correct for the first two challenges.

I’m still wrestling with colour correction though!

---