I've finally had a go at Kentmere 400 (35mm), which I had lying around for way too long. First two rolls at box speed came out flat as anything in Rodinal, with all info in the left 1/3rd of the histogram (indoor shots) and post processing it to tolerable contrast made the grain pop so much I wanted to stretch that histogram.
Third roll was metered incident @ 200 after doing a test strip, and I kept the time & dilution the same as given for 400 (1:50, 20C, 20min.) which worked out to far more useable negs (for scanning anyway). Keeping the agitation down helps keeping the grain somewhat in check, but that's a region where I'd want to look for further improvement - though as it is, it seems like a useable look for when some grain is called for, and it'll most likely never be really fine. It's improved over previous attempts anyway.
Fairly mild de-noising will make it look smoother in what I think is not an overly 'shopped' way. This is a shot with only the levels tightened around the histogram and no further processing but for a resize:
Wood/Grain by
bimmer1502, on Flickr
It's a wee bit unevenly developed which is likely due to my juice levels being on the, er, economical side. This problem doesn't show up when midtones prevail in the top side of the neg (such as grass etc.), that's how little it is. But at least it shows how little experience I have in film development - so please take my word with a grain of salt
🙂
All that said, trying to find ways of doing something that probably shouldn't be done is a lot of fun! I'll just have to see how repeatable this result is going to be and then it's on to see where I can improve upon it.
And now for the experts to shoot holes in my reasoning & result...
🙂
Cheers,
Derk