Return to the Darkroom

We finally got a camera store in Yuma, and they have a darkroom section. So we picked up some chems and paper and built a temporary but workable darkroom out of our 3rd bedroom and laundry room. No 120 film at the local store yet and I didn't feel like shooing 35mm so I grabbed a roll of Ilford FP4+ that expired 10 years ago and had been sitting in the bottom of a box since then. Exposed in a plastic Lubitel 166 and developed for 8 minutes in ID-11 it actually came out halfway decent. My cheap scanner added a lot of dust and reflections though so these scans don't do the original prints justice at all. If I get some good prints eventually I may dust off my good scanner.

First contact sheet. The shot in the upper right I was trying to shoot through the fence...but kind of like the effect I ended up with. The shot below that was my first and I got the self timer and shutter mixed up - ended up WAY over exposing it. The other two there's a little lizard on the post who blended in very nicely. The upper one was as I metered the scene...the lower one was my out of practice correction to place the tones where I wanted them. Looks like I remember more than I give myself credit for.
Second contact sheet. I didn't have any 120 neg sleeves so I had to cheat an use some 4x5 sleeves I had on hand. Rest of the roll. Amy makes a guest apperance in the shot in the upper right, but she's very small and hard to see. The frame at the bottom right is the one I picked to print first - though the frame on the top of the right column looks like a better exposure. The two upside down ones in the lower left were once the sun started going down and I knew my roll was about up. Didn't think I'd overexpose them though - guess I over compensated for the fading light. I also didn't have any 120 neg sleeves so I had to comprimise and cut these into pairs which slid into some 4x5 sleeves I did have on hand.
3rd work print...dialed back to about a 2.75 on contrast. Closer...but still a bit more than I wanted.
Second work print...went from a 2 to 3.5 on the contrast and swung too far.
1st working print. Way too flat...though once it dried I realized it was closer to what I was looking for than I thought. Interestingly the scan is both a little flatter and a little closer to what I was aiming for. Go figure.

Quick bit of photoshop to clean up one of the images...still nasty though.
The other exposure, I cropped it in this time and on my first test print was quite happy to see that as I expected the tones were much more to my liking. Unfortuantly I had missed noticing that squiggle in the contact sheet. It was a hair that apparently got embedded in the film sometime durring processing. Even worse it was on the emulsion side. I was able to remove the offending hair...but it left behind a gap in the emulsion - so it must have been there for processing.
I saw this little guy sitting on a weathered post so I snapped a quick shot of him. As usual the scan does not do the print justice. The tonal scale is blown out and the sharpness of the original is lost. For casual viewing the scan is ok - but it does little to show the actual qualities of the print. Not that it was a great shot or anything in the first place!