Halide Notes

Rodinal at 1+100, stand developing for an hour

March notes

Stand development forgives a lot of metering mistakes, which is exactly why I keep coming back to it on overcast days. An hour at room temperature, one inversion at the ten minute mark, and the highlights stay controlled even when three frames on the same roll were shot two stops apart.

The trade-off is grain. It's coarser than a normal 1+50 dilution, and on 400-speed stock it starts to look gritty past a 6x enlargement. Fine for contact sheets, less fine for the one frame I actually wanted to print big.

A cheap changing bag is still a changing bag

February notes

Spent a long time convinced I needed a better one before I'd load film properly in the dark. Turns out the problem was never the bag — it was practicing the reel-loading motion with the lights on until my hands knew it without looking.

Why I stopped chasing archival everything

January notes

Somewhere along the way "keep your negatives forever" turned into a small anxiety about sleeve brands and washing times. The negatives from my first roll, stored badly in a shoebox for years, are still printable. Good enough beats perfect enough to never finish a roll.