My first roll of Ilford XP2... awesome! :D

[Hood]

Since getting back into shooting film more again, and inspired by some of the phenomenal works that some of you guys have shot here. I had the desire to shoot some B&W film for a while now. I have already shot a roll of Kentmere 400, however being traditional B&W I have not been able to get it developed down the local C41 lab. So while that roll chills in the fridge till I can justify driving the 100 odd km's to the nearest professional processing place, I loaded a roll of XP2 into my Minolta X700 and enjoyed shooting it over the last 2 w/e's, using my Minolta 50mm F2 lens.

I am quite happy with the results, if not a little bright, but I think this may be down to the store processing. They did manage to scan them the wrong way so I had to go and flip the images in Photoshop, I hope I didn't miss any. I wanted to present them more as I got them. I will have a go at correcting them a little in Photoshop at a later date.

Here are a few of my shots. I hope you enjoy.

In my haste, I accidentally shot these first few at 200iso, so some are a little over exposed.
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I finally realised my error and changed the iso to 400 for the rest of the roll
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15.)I must admit I was thinking of you Ian when I shot this one.


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[skida]

You have some stunning architecture round there, Hood, and you captured it well. The slight brightness isn't too bad, but raising the shadows in Picasa would make a big difference I believe.

There is one issue that worries me about your shots here and that is the amount of dust specks. I think this really demonstrates how sloppy the lab is with your film.

[Hood]

Cheers Skiida.
It is actually rather dull around here, I just try to seek out new subject matter to shoot for you guys. It would be pretty boring if I just posted pics from my walk in the local park every week. Haha

I was concerned about the dust specks and such too. But due to my lack of knowledge of film processing was unsure where it had come from.
Is there anything I can do to try and prevent this? Or is it all in the lab processing?

[skida]

I am sure there are some people here that can give an experienced answer, but I am assuming that after the develop stage someone has to feed the film into the scanner manually and that is why some of your negs were scanned back to front. They don't seem to have been very careful about avoiding dust either, which is a worry because of the risk of scratching the negs.

When I got my last roll of HP5 developed at the local lab here, there were one or two dust specks but nothing like what you have got. I hope someone else can give an opinion in case I am being unreasonable in what to expect from a lab.

They may say "skida is talking out of his bottom, because all labs do that", but I suspect they may well agree with me.

[skida]

ps: In no.s 25 and 26, I love how you have shown the way the building seems to have been inspired by the plants in front.

[Hood]