Weeks​ 12: How Low Can You Go?

 ​Some weeks it seems like none of the rolls I shoot are worth writing about. Sometimes I stop by my favorite camera store on the way home from work just to dig through their stash of expired film. Occasionally an interesting roll bubbles to the surface like an old bone from the La Brea tar pits. Some Rollei ATP 1.1 32 iso 35mm came to light in an appropriately jet black canister with plain black lettering on a white label, “Advanced Technical Pan”.

The nondescript packaging intrigued me as well as that it was 32 iso and who knows how old. The slowest film I’ve ever used was Kodachrome 64 back in the Fred Flintstone days. I was assured that the lab folks could process just about anything except e6 so I took it home.

The choice of cameras was an easy one. If the Zorki 4k couldn’t make some decent images with it none of the rest of my menagerie would stand a chance. I loaded it and did a bit of research before diving into the world of slow speed photography.

In an old advert the Rollei ATP 1.1 was described as a super-panchromatic film that was a good replacement for the discontinued Kodak Technical Pan. It has low sensitivity, high contrast, extremely fine grain and sharpness. The contrast is also  supposed to have to have been controllable depending on which Rollei developer is used. Since the local lab would be using a standard developer the results would be totally unpredictable. 

I decided to alternate shooting at 1/30 and 1/60 second and guesstimate the aperture. At the most this experiment would cost $8 at the most so I didn’t have a whole lot to lose even if the roll was totally blank. Unfortunately the weather was typical for Colorado springtime,  cloudy when you really want some sunny days for photography.
The quality of the images was better than I expected. What do you think?