Sunday 3 February 2013

Spursinn HCD

When I saw this new German B&W film developer advertised by AG-Photographic (UK film products supplier  web site is here) I thought I would give it a try. According to them 'Spursinn HCD 2+S is a unique and special 2 part developer and allows for massive flexibility in your chosen black and white film's exposure speed'

I rather broke the rules for testing when I tried out a short roll of Freestyle Legacy Pro 400 (expired March 2011) in my newly arrived Olympus Mju II (really I should have tested it using a camera I've used before). 

Freestyle Legacy 400 is actually rebranded Fuji Neopan 400, and I used the times for that film. I exposed it EI800. This is quite tricky on the Mju as film speed is set by the DX coding on the film cassette, so I used an old film cassette from a EI800 film and wound the Legacy 400 into that. I wanted to use an high speed not just to test the HCD but also as the weather is very dull at the moment.

The development process is a bit more complex than I am used to:
1) Pre-soak in water for 2 mins
2) Then 3 mins in the HCD-2 (30 sec agitation at the start only)
3) Then 5.5 mins in the HCD-2 (30 sec agitation to start then 3 inversions every minute)
4) Stop and fix as normal

The resulting negatives have lots of contrast and considering they are pushed by 1 stop they are relatively fine grained. Here are some examples (not very good subjects, and a very dull weekend):



I'm quite impressed with the results and will definitely use this developer again, perhaps trying even higher speeds

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