Kentmere 400, latest samples

dourbalistar said:
Nikon FM2n, AI Nikkor 50mm f/1.8S, Kentmere Pan 400, developed in LegacyPro L110 at 1:31 for 5.5 minutes.


2022.02.17 Roll #299-06994-positive.jpg by dourbalistar, on Flickr
Click to expand...
First, it looks like you guys had a blast! Nice photos. You're getting much better results than I have been using Kentmere 400. I've been shooting at box speed and then processing with D-76. Photos look more like this:

DSCF7466.jpg
It's just grainy in a way I don't find very pleasing. I'm about 50' through a bulk roll. So I'm wondering if you have any tips? I see you're using Legacy L110. I tried HC110, used it with Catlabs 320, but I got scared of it because it quite suddenly lost all its potency and I destroyed 5 rolls of film from a vacation. I'm not very experience with home developing.
 
AlexMogens said:
I see you're using Legacy L110. I tried HC110, used it with Catlabs 320, but I got scared of it because it quite suddenly lost all its potency and I destroyed 5 rolls of film from a vacation. I'm not very experience with home developing.
Click to expand...
That’s interesting. HC-110 was reformulated when Kodak changed manufacturers in 2019 or around then. Sorry, long list of questions but:
- when did you buy the HC-110, and how long after did it fail?
- Did the HC-110 provide zero density, or just very faint negatives
- was it still in date?
- how was it stored?
This is very interesting, and sorry for all the questions, but the old HC-110 was known to last basically forever (I had some from the 1960s in the 1990s and it worked fine) and the reformulation has a lot of users concerned about the behaviour of the new product.

@dourbalistar how long do you keep your Legacy Pro L110, and have you had any problems? The new HC-110 seems chemically identical to L110.
 
AlexMogens said:
First, it looks like you guys had a blast! Nice photos. You're getting much better results than I have been using Kentmere 400. I've been shooting at box speed and then processing with D-76. Photos look more like this:

View attachment 4822588
It's just grainy in a way I don't find very pleasing. I'm about 50' through a bulk roll. So I'm wondering if you have any tips? I see you're using Legacy L110. I tried HC110, used it with Catlabs 320, but I got scared of it because it quite suddenly lost all its potency and I destroyed 5 rolls of film from a vacation. I'm not very experience with home developing.
Click to expand...
Thank you and welcome to RFF, @AlexMogens! You'll find a trove of resources here and members who are insanely knowledgeable and experienced. As far as tips for Kentmere 400 go, my personal preference is to slightly overexpose from box speed. In my experience, the film handles overexposed highlights better than underexposed shadows. I'll sometimes take an incident meter reading (Sekonic L-208) for tricky lighting situations.

As for developers, I've only ever used LegacyPro L110 with Kentmere 400, so I can't really speak to other developer combinations. I shared some thoughts about LegacyPro L110 on another thread, but I've not had issues with the developer suddenly going bad and losing all potency. I'm not a particularly high volume shooter (~30-50 rolls per year), so it takes me a while to get through a 16oz (473 mL) bottle of developer at the 1:31 dilution, usually using ~19 mL of developer in a Paterson Super System 4 developing tank. Maybe there's a very slight drop in performance near the end of the bottle, but I've not made any scientific comparisons. For an amateur hobbyist like me it's hard to discern a significant drop in quality, but your mileage may vary. I should probably keep better track of when I open a bottle, how long it takes to finish, and whether there's any discernible performance difference between a fresh bottle and the dregs of an opened one.

All that said, your digitizing and post processing workflow will certainly have an impact on the final result, so sometimes it's hard to judge and make 1:1 comparisons because of all the different variables. Hope that helps, but happy to answer any other questions!
 
Freakscene said:
That’s interesting. HC-110 was reformulated when Kodak changed manufacturers in 2019 or around then. Sorry, long list of questions but:
- when did you buy the HC-110, and how long after did it fail?
- Did the HC-110 provide zero density, or just very faint negatives
- was it still in date?
- how was it stored?
This is very interesting, and sorry for all the questions, but the old HC-110 was known to last basically forever (I had some from the 1960s in the 1990s and it worked fine) and the reformulation has a lot of users concerned about the behaviour of the new product.

@dourbalistar how long do you keep your Legacy Pro L110, and have you had any problems? The new HC-110 seems chemically identical to L110.
Click to expand...
I bought it in Spring ‘22 via Amazon. It was stored in its bottle, I mixed the dilutions every time I developed. It was working very well until it didn’t. When I returned from a trip in July, I processed three rolls of 35mm and the negatives came out with zero density. I assumed that I’d used the fix first by mistake (did that once). So I loaded up 2 rolls of 120 with the same result, paying extremely close attention. I was really shocked when I got the same result. I troubleshot it with some kind folks on Flickr and we felt that the developer was completely ineffective so it was doing nothing and then the fix was erasing the emulsion.
 
AlexMogens said:
I bought it in Spring ‘22 via Amazon. It was stored in its bottle, I mixed the dilutions every time I developed. It was working very well until it didn’t. When I returned from a trip in July, I processed three rolls of 35mm and the negatives came out with zero density. I assumed that I’d used the fix first by mistake (did that once). So I loaded up 2 rolls of 120 with the same result, paying extremely close attention. I was really shocked when I got the same result. I troubleshot it with some kind folks on Flickr and we felt that the developer was completely ineffective so it was doing nothing and then the fix was erasing the emulsion.
Click to expand...

Thanks for responding.

Amazing. So it was only a few months old? That’s crazy. Was it just stored in the dark at normal indoor temperatures in the bottle it was sold in?
 
Freakscene said:
Thanks for responding.

Amazing. So it was only a few months old? That’s crazy. Was it just stored in the dark at normal indoor temperatures in the bottle it was sold in?
Click to expand...
It was in the basement, which is dark or dim most of the time. It’s been hard for me mentally (after losing all the analog shots I took on that trip) to return to HC110. I’d like to though, because I’m not liking D76 as much.
 
AlexMogens said:
It was in the basement, which is dark or dim most of the time. It’s been hard for me mentally (after losing all the analog shots I took on that trip) to return to HC110. I’d like to though, because I’m not liking D76 as much.
Click to expand...
Thanks, quite mysterious.

There are instructions here: Kodak HC-110 Developer - Unofficial Resource Page which would help with L110 or new HC-110 storage.

I still have 5L of the old stuff.
 
AlexMogens said:
It’s been hard for me mentally (after losing all the analog shots I took on that trip) to return to HC110. I’d like to though, because I’m not liking D76 as much.
Click to expand...
Yeah, losing photos from a trip is tough. LegacyPro L110 has been my primary developer since 2016 and haven't had any issues with it going off. I'm about to open a new bottle, and I need to remember to mark when I opened it. Ilford doesn't publish times for developing Kentmere 400 in LegacyPro L110 (or HC-110), but 5.5 minutes has worked well for me.

Nikon FM2n, AI Nikkor 50mm f/1.8S, Kentmere Pan 400, developed in LegacyPro L110 at 1:31 for 5.5 minutes.


2022.07.28 Roll #316-07438-positive.jpg by dourbalistar, on Flickr
 
dourbalistar said:
Yeah, losing photos from a trip is tough. LegacyPro L110 has been my primary developer since 2016 and haven't had any issues with it going off. I'm about to open a new bottle, and I need to remember to mark when I opened it. Ilford doesn't publish times for developing Kentmere 400 in LegacyPro L110 (or HC-110), but 5.5 minutes has worked well for me.

Nikon FM2n, AI Nikkor 50mm f/1.8S, Kentmere Pan 400, developed in LegacyPro L110 at 1:31 for 5.5 minutes.


2022.07.28 Roll #316-07438-positive.jpg by dourbalistar, on Flickr
Click to expand...
Do you expose it at EI 400 @dourbalistar ?

I increasingly doubt that I will ever use film again, and if I do it will be big sheets, but I do still develop film for other people, so knowing how you work would be handy.

Marty
 
Freakscene said:
Do you expose it at EI 400 @dourbalistar ?

I increasingly doubt that I will ever use film again, and if I do it will be big sheets, but I do still develop film for other people, so knowing how you work would be handy.

Marty
Click to expand...
My personal EI is probably closer to 250...? On my Nikon FM2n, I set the internal meter to 400 and usually target +/o in the exposure display, which means overexposure by 1/5 to 1 stop (but not more than 1 stop, which is just the + indicator by itself). In tricky lighting, I use an incident meter (Sekonic L-208) set at 400 and usually use what the meter recommends. Maybe that's an unconventional way of metering, but it works for me.
 
Zathros said:
A 1967 VW Bug! It looks just like the one I used to have. I loved that car.
Click to expand...
I know there are subtle differences that VW Bug aficionados can use to identify the exact model year, but I'm not savvy enough to pick them out. A 1967 is just a few years younger than this 1963 Plymouth Valiant of the same era.

Nikon FM2n, AI Nikkor 50mm f/1.8S, Kentmere Pan 400, developed in LegacyPro L110 at 1:31 for 5.5 minutes.


2022.12.03 Roll #323-07664-positive.jpg by dourbalistar, on Flickr
 
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