10^3 Words

400TX @ EI3200; Leica M4, coll. Summicron 50/2
HC110h @70F for 25 min, agitation 30 s + 5 inversions every 5 min

I spent a week in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in November 2006 for business, and idled away several of my evenings walking the streets in a random pattern. I’ve always been something of a night owl – especially if my experience in Iceland is any guide – and once I started to photograph things, it was a natural step towards night photography, and low-light work in general.

This image was part of a larger experiment, namely rating 400TX at 3200 in low light and seeing what would come of it. There was plenty of precedent for this, of course, as 400TX (the “new” Tri-X) is remarkably pushable. My experiment was mostly successful – once I figured out the appropriate developing route, of course. Other images from this roll were much higher-contrast scenes, and even the minimal agitation route describe above couldn’t lower the apparent image contrast in the negative.

So far, though, I love what low-agitation processing has to offer. I have a great recipe for “semi-stand” developing (that is, for letting the film sit in the soup for a long time) that I’m dying to try.

The negative itself was scanned with a Nikon LS-50 at 4000 dpi, and per my typical procedure was post-processed a bit in the digital domain. Unsurprisingly, the negative needed some spotting and cleaning, as my developing routine is still not super-clean. Levels, curves, and sharpening followed.

You can see, in the upper right-hand corner, an odd feature that looks like ripples in the frame. I can only assume that it’s an optical effect, perhaps light spill from a streetlight somewhere very close behind my shooting position. I left it in, honoring my tendency to use full-frame crops wherever possible. I also don’t like to be too heavy-handed with digital editing – at least, not at the moment.