Barbed Wire Fence II

This was shot on Rollei Retro 80S (which is really Agfa Aviphot Pan 80 now produced by Maco) without a filter. It was shot using a Mamiya M645 1000S with an 80mm lense and developed in Rodinal (1:50) for 14 minutes. This film can be a difficult one to employ successfully when the scene being photographed contains areas of vastly different luminance. In this case, the shadows and highlights are not too far apart, and the scene presents no such difficulty. I would speculate that the high solar angle also worked in my favor. This film is in truth manufactured for aerial reconnaissance and only later cut down to smaller sizes, and it is optimized for use as such. The data sheet (available at the site linked above) states that it can be developed to different levels of contrast depending on processing. In my experience, it normally displays very high contrast unless you make efforts to achieve some other result. For scenes with a difference in illumination greater than a few stops give or take, it is normally only possible to give correct exposure for one area or another. But this makes sense. As many old Kodak aerial data sheets note, aerial scenes differ from scenes encountered in normal photography in that the illumination is more or less constant. On the ground, areas of deep shade are often many stops darker than areas in bright sun, and as such may have almost no density on the negative. That having been said, this is a wonderful film when used correctly. The tonality is very pleasing when you can get it to come out properly.