Regarding my anxieties surrounding photo-making: my fears. All true. While I worked through a roll of Fomapan during *another* cold snap, I went four days without developing anything. When I set out to do so on Wednesday after finishing the roll, everything felt off.
The choice of developer1, the stubbornly cold water temperature2, that the Mass Dev Chart app does *not* sync preferences between devices3… I could tell from the moment I poured the root beer-like developer into the tank that this was not going to be great.
And it wasn’t. A total regression to the results I could expect when I started developing in 2024 welcomed me from the kitchen sink with an almost pathetic wince.
I hoped they would be recoverable in scanning, but no, well, not really. Runaway highlights, pale shadows, extra grain, too much contrast. It’s all there. I found a way to overdevelop in the most obnoxious-to-me ways.
Fortunately, I don’t believe I’ve been cursed. I developed a roll last night which looks far more promising using a developer I’ve never used before.
One way or another, the results will be shared here!
Camera
Lens
Film
Developer
Scanner
Location
Date(s)
Filing
Nikon F80
Nikon Nikkor AF 50mm f/1.8 D
Arista EDU Ultra 100 (Fomapan Classic 100)
Flic Film Black, White, and Green (1+49)
Plustek 8200i / SilverFast 9
Ottawa, Ontario
March 1, 2026 (1-2)
March 2, 2026 (3-4)
March 4, 2026 (5-10)
Series 7, Roll 030
- My record with Black, White, and Green is quite mixed. Good enough for me to finish the small bottle, not good enough to purchase it again. It was the first time I had used it with Fomapan 100 and I mostly chose it because I didn’t want to mix other chemistries from powder (Mic-X, ID-11, D-96, FX-37, Microphen, and Perceptol, all on hand), use Rodinal (due to fear of getting the results I ended up with), or HC-110 (which seems to require constant agitation with the film). I really should have mixed up some Mic-X. ↩︎
- Being such a thick developer, I thought to use the pressure of tap water to get the rest of the B/W/G out of my small grad, making the final mix a rather cold 16.5C. I did get the chemistry up to 20C using my sous vide machine, but I got impatient and used it as soon as I saw it reach 20. Not that that would have been a factor: this roll seems rather cooked, so it’s possible that it was warmer than 20? Or that the Flic/MDC time for Foma 100 was too long? ↩︎
- I recently dedicated a long-disused iPhone 8 to development timer duties and had just assumed that my inversion defaults would have carried over along with all of my saved times. While I didn’t follow the app’s instructions, it was distracting. ↩︎