A new one for me…
portrait of 903 by
stillshunter, on Flickr
...well certainly not the subject - just a quick glance at my Flickr stream will find you tagging me the Cowman or the Bovine Bloke - but the kit and development combination are a new thing.
Kit:
Bought a Minolta Himatic 7sii recently. Was very neglected indeed - hence the good price. So I cleaned it a while ago and took it for a run - not so good. The arrival of light seals from Jon Goodman prompted me to revisit the camera a little more intensely. Yesterday's first film trial was a very different story altogether.
The first thing that struck me about the 7sii was that the build quality seemed wanting, compared to other 70s rangefinders I've shot - namely Canonet QL17, Olympus SP and RC and Konica S3. In a nutshell the 7sii felt a little hollow and wobbly by comparison. But after a time it really grew on me. This Himatic's controls are well-placed and it has a nice balance of features - better size than the Oly SP, better manual control than the S3, much faster than the RC and that Rokkor lens blows the Canonet clean out of the water. Actually blows all out of the water other than the S3 on pure resolving power, but the Rokkor seems to have more character - a character reminiscent of the Zeiss lenses (50/2 and 35/2.8) I sported on the M2. A little use shows the 7sii is a very worthwhile proposition indeed.
Development:
I've returned to shooting TMY (T-Max 400) and it is like coming home - I absolutely love this emulsion. I also tried a developer I've never used before - Ilford Perceptol. It is lauded for its extra fine grain and I thought it might complement the T-grains nicely. I was not wrong. This stuff is soooo creamy and very low grain, though it seems to be at the expense of a little contrast and sharpness. Personally it gives the images a feel that really resonates with me. Though the base colour of the negatives when you pull them out of the post-rinse is a shock!
BTW: the above image was scanned and LR4 used to clone out three dust spots and convert to jpg. That's it! No curves adjustment, masking, sharpening, noise reduction, gamma blah, blah!
Love film!