A deadly combo of the Pyro510 developer, Agent Shadow film, and Horizon202 camera.

 

Don’t ask me why i’m so excited – I’ll tell you what’s up. Sometimes small things make me happier than something huge and more significant, like say, winning a million in the lottery, I still haven’t won even 1/100 part of a million, because I don’t buy lottery tickets, so I can’t compare. But let’s return back to the small things..

Some short time ago I purchased a 100ml bottle of one of the modern pyro developers PYRO 510, developed by Jay DeFehr (nice wordplay – he developed developer !!) from the “ZONE IMAGING LAB”. PYRO 510 is described as “extremely fine grain, high acutance, very long tonal range and a long shelf life (6+ years)” agent, so this long shelf life was an additional reason to try it and to have it for a “black day”.

I got the package surprisingly fast and immediately decided to try it on one of the exposed fresh rolls stored in the fridge. I choose a recently finished with Ricoh GR1s HP5 roll – as usual, when I’m going to try something new or different I change only one component, with the goal to find a mistake by discarding sure components. In my combination freshly purchased and exposed ilford HP5 and the “workhorse” Ricoh GR1s camera.

The PYRO 510 working solution is 1:100, and I messed up a bit with the measurements of the only 4ml when using the supplied with the developer dispenser. Somehow the connection of the bottle and the dispenser was not connected well, the very thick syrup of the developer oozed here and there and I began to panic, which is a very unusual condition for me. Anyway, I managed to measure the winning 4ml of the thick syrup of the PYRO 510 and got a yellowish 400ml of the working solution. I started the 8min developing process as usual, stopped with water, fixed, and… I got clean and transparent like a morning dew celluloid of the HP5 film, which for sure was exposed.

On the next day, I decided to “correct the mistake” or whatever, what is happened recently. I took another SURE freshly exposed ilford HP5 with the same “workhorse” Ricoh GR1s. This time I used my pipette and successfully managed to measure another 4ml of the syrup for the next 400ml of the working solution. This time I wasn’t even surprised when I got another clean and transparent like a morning dew celluloid of the HP5.

This time I felt completely stupid and started to check all the online notes, tweets and blogs of the people who used the PYRO 510 and of course found nothing similar to my experience. And then I checked my beloved Ricoh GR1s and found that the shutter located in the lens just stuck and closed completely. I lost my dear everyday camera, but got some hope that I can develop with PYRO again and possibly get some results (I became careful in my preliminary statements). Long story short – yesterday I finished this roll of the amazing Agent Shadow with another not less amazing Horizon 202 and developed again in PYRO. I scanned just 4 frames as a great sample of how nice the results I got this time. Happy END.

And now about serious. I wish to call this post “the DIVERSITY”. There is a little bit of everything here. The Urbex with thousands of people scurrying below, maybe not be visible, but believe me they are there – inside the buildings and around in cars, restaurants, stores, and just on the sidewalks. As well the rural urbanity with no people, but with traces of them, working in the open fields. The overcrowded Jerusalem Mahane Yehuda market and absolutely empty, touched only by wind and sun, white dune. Choose what you love, or choose all of them for the nonstop Tik Tok-like non-stop changing life with all the kinds of conditions. Thank you for getting to this line.