domenica 10 gennaio 2016

Rollei RPX 25 in tour

I took picutres during a motorbike trip in the Alps, sunny days uf August, perfect sky, no filter used.

Rollei RPX 25 developed in Studional (Rodinal Special) 1+30, 4'30" 24°C (equivalent to 7' at 20°C).

Development time looks fine if one considers the general density impression of the negative.

However, once scanned the look is very compressed, the tonal range is really strane. The highlights look incredibly compressed and compensated. There is tonal differentiation, but very little.

This is an image scanned with a flat curve. Above there is a patch of cloudy sky. The sky looks grey as the mountains in the distant haze.






Tweaking the curves slightly, giving it a shoulder in the highlights while retaining black shadows, improves the situation little. Loook at this image, which has more sky.
The clouds remain grey, as the sky. There is no way to get white clouds on a blue sky.

Stelvio - Leica R3 - 50/2
I would not call the results  pleasing. In fact, I consider most of the shots of this trip almost unusable.

This shows that RPX25 is not an easy film and not an easy repplacement to APX25 or Efke/Adox 25.

The mid-to-low tonal range is excellent and shows a high level of detail. I would not recomment just using it at a higher speed (e.g. 32/16 ISO).

Perhaps this developer combination is not ideal, I will attempt further tests.