Wherein I ramble about riding my bike and the magic of Rodinal
I’m fortunate on two fronts. On the first front, I am fortunate to live in a place where it’s possible for me to ride my bike to work. On the second front, I am fortunate to often work early in the morning which, especially in the summer gives me the chance to ride to work during the magical light of the early morning. Golden hour rides, in other words.
Sunday morning I grabbed the trusty Canon EOS 650 and the equally trusty Canon 50/1.8 to bring with me on the ride in to work. I deliberated for a minute about whether to bring the EOS 650 or the Canon 6D but ultimately opted to bring the EOS 650 because I’ve actually been shooting color almost exclusively for a couple months now and decided it would be interesting to shoot some black and white film to see how it went. I went for a roll of Arista EDU Ultra 400 since I’ve been trying to work my way through the ten rolls I bought back when I started the H35N episode. I’m down to one left now and it’ll be bulk loading Kentmere 400 when it’s done.
I’ve been enjoying the Arista quite a bit, actually. It’s a “cheap” film but I’ve been more than happy with the results it’s able to deliver. Its biggest failure, which seems to plague most of the bargain films, is its propensity to scratch. But generally that’s pretty easy to fix in Lightroom. I souped it in Rodinal 1:50 this time around and I’m always struck by how gorgeous Rodinal looks. The subtlety of tones and rendering of light is something that always seems to be rendered especially beautifully with Rodinal and black and white film. I was talking to a friend about how I might die on the hill proclaiming that it’s a look that is, if not impossible, at least difficult to reproduce from a digital sensor. And I’m not generally one of those “FiLm MaGiC” purist kind of people. I have a whole article on that somewhere on here.
I’ve been very much enjoying shooting color, I’ve even been leaning toward ordering a bunch of Gold 200 and the Cinestill C41 kit to try and develop color film at home, because it is prohibitively expensive to try and do anything else. How people are buying color film and sending it out to have it developed and scanned and still affording food it beyond me. But, all that said, black and white film in Rodinal is look that’s hard to not want to shoot more of. Maybe I will.