Adox CHS Art 100

After my previous misfortunes with the Adox I had a much better luck this time. As I was shipping almost illegally my photography chemicals to Dubai and had nightmares about getting jailed I decided I will only go for essential stuff - like developer and fixer. So I no longer have a stop bath, but let's face it - you can obviously live without it.

The other issue with Dubai is - it is hot. Like really! So stand development is not really an option here as temperature of the tank can easily creep up while you wait for it to be developed.

The above leaves me with the only option of going for normal development. This time I didn't presoak the film and developed it for only 6 minutes, didn't use a stop bath and actually the results turned out quite sharp - with some grain at the lower speeds and without getting burnt areas like last time.

The two of us

Adox CHS Art 100

Experimenting is a good thing. That is how I found my favourite film so far - Acros 100. Pity soon it will be way to grey and dark in London to use it.

I went this Friday to buy some film as I was running low and I thought I would go adventures and try something new, the only film Silverprint has in stock and I haven't tried so far was something called Adox. Cheap and cheerful, so why not try it.

And so I did.

I think the results didn't turn too well. It was already getting dark outside and on top of it was cloudy, so I had to shoot on low speeds hand-held, which led to quite a few of the shots being blurred.

I also messed up the development, which led to the non-blurred shots to get burnt areas. The thing is Adox apparently is a single layer film which makes it very sensitive to all the chemicals, unlike all the others I have used so far (mostly Acros 100, Kodak and Ilford). I normally soak the film in tap water while I am mixing the developer just to get it ready and all. However I realized something is not right when the water I poured out of the development tank was blue. I used just tap water instead of stop bath and fixed for just 4 minutes instead of the 6 I usually do. After I went read a bit more (unfortunately I was too excited to develop it to take the time to read all this in advance) turned out Rodinal (the developer I am using) gives a lot of grain with this film

Sorry for posting the same bench from the back and from the front, but this is only for illustrative purposes of my inadequacy with the Adox film. Plus I have a thing about benches!

I have one more roll and will use it next weekend with proper light and will also do some portraits to check how it behaves with those.

Coming in the next post few of the good shots.