Polaroid Land Camera 330

I got this lovely old folding Polaroid on e-bay for just £6! The seller listed it incorrectly as a Kodak camera which may explain how I got it so cheap. The 330 model has a glass rather than plastic lens (that the 320 and lower numbers have). Its  in pretty good condition considering its age.

First task was to see if the 'electronic eye' which adjusts the shutter speed works. To do this a battery is needed.

The camera originally took a 3v battery which are not longer widely available. Luckily I had an AAA battery holder handy which takes two AAA cells to give 3 volts. I wired this up temporarily to check if the shutter works. In the dark the shutter can be heard closing a few seconds after the button is pressed showing that a longer exposure would have been made.

The Fuji FP-3000 film arrived (also from e-bay) and, with the battery still not properly fixed I tried it out. I went for an indoor mirror self portrait. The first photo was pretty dark so I tuned up the setting to lighter and tried again. This time the shot was still a little dark but quite sharp:

The pack film produces a kinda negative along with the print, I quite liked the effect of that so I scanned that part too:

Not bad for a first attempt. Next I must fix the battery properly.

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