Harbetonford Church again, this time on Rollei Retro 80S

Ed Bray · Apr 1, 2012

Revisited Harbertonford village again to try out some Rollei Retro 80S, again developed in Caffenol CL (my now goto Developer with Semi-Stand technique).
Again, using my Fuji GX680 this time with a 125mm Fujinon lens at f22 again with a Yellow Filter.

What has astounded me is the amount of detail this film can hold. Whilst pictorially it is very good, when I started looking at the shadow detail at 100% I could see there was more than just some blocked up dark tones, once I had selected my shadow areas at 100% I then lifted the exposure by 2.5 stops to see what was actually there, what can I say, it really surprised me.

Harbertonford Church 125mm Lens Rollei Retro 80S by Ed Bray, on Flickr

100% crop lower LH side by Ed Bray, on Flickr

100% crop lower RH side by Ed Bray, on Flickr

Mike_E · Apr 4, 2012

Great results, I was googling caffenol and came across this blog.. Caffenol. ( I hadn't seen it before and thought it worth sharing)

Do you also print with Caffenol?

Ed Bray · Apr 4, 2012

Thanks for the comments, yes I am aware of Reinholds Blog, in fact we were discussing this image on my Flickr yesterday.

I don't wet print at the moment although I have more than enough darkroom equipment for me to outfit two full darkrooms, when stuff was being sold off cheaply a while ago I bought some up and then a friend of mine gave me an amazing amount of darkroom stuff too. I am not sure if I want to go down that route again at the moment, the results I am getting from my colour managed system (printer, scanner and monitors) are pretty much as good as anything I produced in the darkroom and a lot easier and less messy, although I do miss the magic of the image appearing on the paper when in the developer. The other thing is that wet printing is just so expensive these days too.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I only started using Caffenol a couple of months ago and after a few okay attempts have been producing some outstanding negatives lately using my slightly adapted version of Reinhold's Caffenol CL (I add 0.7 Pot Bromide per 500ml). My results with Ilfords XP2 Super have blown me away with regard to the tonal range, lack of grain and the density of the negatives, and this from what is normally a C41 process film.