New Experiment - Contax RTS III with Kodak HIE film

The HIE is, of course, OLD. And unlike most of what I have left, it was in the fridge not the freezer. There are too many experiments going on simultaneously here. First maybe the film is fogged or less sensitive. Or maybe the RTSIII has some characteristic that will not facilitate HIE — data back, some kind of sensor pollution (I did cover the little window but I’m not sure it mattered). The manual did talk about using HIE film and didn’t say anything about the window or the back so I figured it would be interesting. Will use D76 again (I always have used D76 on HIE, even in the old days).

 

I measured exposure using a Minolta Auto Meter modified to measure pretty much the exact spectrum HIE is sensitive to. I bought it LONG ago from a man named David Romano who had a cottage industry in modifying them and selling them. He hasn’t sold them for decades, not even sure he’s still taking pictures, but it’s a pretty cool device. I remember in the old days all the problems of calculating exposure from your lying light meter. Anyway using the 25A filter with the meter set for 320 (zone V). The meter has a 25A filter on it as well!

 

I went to a place called Founders Cemetary in Roswell, Georgia, but alas they seem to have had a calamity. The tree that really made the cemetary special had fallen and taken out a fair bit of the fencing and nearly knocked down some of the taller monuments. The tree was gone and the cemetary was sadly depleted. But I did the best I could anyway.

 

I have always done HIE shooting with my Leica M2 (no filter in the way of focusing and no automatic issues and no film window) but I thought I’d see what the RTS III could do. It’s a bear of a camera, very heavy, but a sweet operating machine. My RTS 1’s and 2’s have packed up and now I only have the RTS III (repaired after a year of effort) and a Contax Aria which has never had any issues. The Contax SLRs are the only film cameras I enjoy using as much as the Leica M2s. Anyway, might be a total disaster with no images, or I might get something. I will post when I develop it and scan it (if there is anything to scan). If it comes out with something, maybe there is hope for my frozen HIE.

Ok, experiment complete. First, the film wasn't obviously fogged. Nor did the data back mess anything up, THOUGH the numbers were illegible (which may mean that the IR film takes the data oddly). I covered up the film window but I bet that wouldn't have mattered either. Nothing like frame sensors or anything did anything bad to the film. The RTSIII is a fine Infrared camera. However, I estimate that the film has maybe lost a stop of sensitivity (so in future I might try setting the ISO a touch lower). I bracketed down (so what the meter said and then 1 stop more exposure) so my results are pretty good. Here are some samples.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty nice! I have a roll of HIE in the fridge, though I am not so sure where it was previously.

 

I now have more hope that I might get something useful from it.

 

I also have some 5R flashbulbs to figure out a use for.

Love the Contaxes. Pretty much my favourite SLRs, although I have only owned the RTS. Very nice cemetery, too.

I really liked the RTS I but I've bought 2 of them and the electronics are just fragile and unfixable as far as I've been able to ascertain. I have a RTSII which isn't working either. Here is what that great tree used to look like.

 

These are nice images for an "experiment" . . .

 

In the mid-90's, I sat in on a seminar with a guy who was doing a lot IR shooting. His recommendation, and his images were fantastic, was to set the camera meter to 640 and meter through the filter.

That can work, though in the old days, it depended a lot on the camera and its metering system. Some meters were not very sensitive to IR and gave bad readings for certain things like vegetation and bodies of water. Interestingly my Leica M8 with a filter almost always meters the IR very effectively due to it's infamous infrared sensitivity. Every book I've ever read had a hundred rules on when to recognize when your meter was going to go wrong.

 

There is also a lot of variation on how you expose IR film in terms of what you get. I used to try to read up but I was never really expert (hence the purchase of my Minolta meter).

 

I probably need to go back and read up on my books if I take more HIE out to shoot. Plus, HIE is kind of a PITA right? It has to be loaded and unloaded in the dark (changing bag or darkroom), and doesn't work well in all cameras and is tricky to meter (usually). And now it's lost some sensitivity so we need to take that into account. And then the scene you're looking at is hard enough to "see" in black and white, but seeing it in infrared is even harder. My visualization is very rusty these days. And digital infrared, though very nice, has a very different look than HIE due to the characteristics of the film (grain, halo due to lack of an anti-halation layer, and so on). There is (or was) an old machine house near here that I'll have to go visit again (Vickery Creek Park, Roswell, Georgia).

Nice work.

I'm getting low in my personal stashes of old and out-dated film, but it's amazing how well they can work out sometimes.

Selenium and CdS are mostly blue sensitive, maybe a little green, but not red or IR.

 

Silicon goes pretty far into the IR, which is why digital cameras need the IR block filters.