The last weekend in May was a mixed bag here in south Alberta. I've been taking vacation days on Friday's to help balance having my office at home during these times. I have regular office hours that I'm good at managing, but it is nice to have that extra day at the end of the week to provide a little space.
Now that spring has settled in and the temperatures are nice I've been using the extra day to do a little exploring. Last Friday was beautiful in Calgary and I went on a little adventure along the river, I didn't take any photographs on the day, I've shot that area of Calgary a lot and there was nothing exceptional that caught my eye, it was just nice to be out for a long walk.
Saturday I ventured out to Longveiw to check out some old Nikon lenses at the Film Experience Camera Store. Dave Marshall has a great selection of vintage gear at reasonable prices. I have been searching for a manual focus zoom lens to use on my little Nikon EM camera. Dave set me up with a great lens for $100. I also seemed to come away with some extra stuff not on my list. Along with some film I found a little Nikon FG, the successor to the EM that has the same small size, plus full manual exposure, it's a great little camera as well!
The plan for the day included a drive on the Cowboy Trail to shoot some Kodak Gold and capture the bright greens and yellows of the spring palette. I shot a roll in each of my little budget Nikons and as always, I'm pleased with how the film performed!
Sunday was dark and stormy so I took the opportunity to develop the film in some well seasoned C41 developer. I routinely develop about 20 rolls of to a batch of C41, the recommendation in the package is 8 rolls, that just seems wasteful. Anyway on this batch of C41 chemicals, I decided to stretch it a little, the two rolls I had shot on Saturday were rolls 23 and 24. I didn't notice any difference on the previous 2 rolls, but I think I found the limit with these ones, on a few of the shots the some of the brown shades started to go a little purple, enough to notice. I have included 1 of these unedited at the end to show what it looks like when you push the developer to the limit! Now that I've done that, I think I will settle into a maximum 16 to 20 rolls for my own C41 photography.
I'm generally pretty pleased with the results, I've only cleaned up some dust spots on these shots from the day on the Cowboy Trail and west to Vulcan.
Enjoy!
Dean
