So I return from that film dev workshop that we held in Braunschweig, home of Rollei and Voigtländer, and I had completely forgotten about that one incident.

Until just now.

Rewind. Imagine a group of photographers experimenting with different developers, fighting about water of the right temperature, stepping on each others' toes (in a nice way of course) and then imagine me standing in the middle of this, thinking "why don't I develop that roll of Efke 50 in T-Max developer?", then elbowing my way to the basin and mixing the developer.

According to the Massive Dev Chart development should have been 6 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius. Turns out amidst all the chaos I ended up with 26 degrees (don't ask), and I didn't notice until it was already in the development tank. Oh well, no harm done, higher temperature can be somewhat evened out by shorter dev time. Didn't have a formula though, and I'm a sucker for strong contrasts, so I went with what my gut told me: "shorten it, but not too much. Maybe down to 5 minutes", which is what I ended up doing.

After the full cycle of developing and fixing the film, I got a bit of a shock when I opened the tank. The film looked like it wasn't fixed. Brownish in nature and the bits that should be transparent didn't look very transparent. Luckily film is pretty much light proof after only a short time of fixing it, so you can always fix some more if you need to. 10 minutes of fixing later the film still didn't look right. It looked pretty much half fixed. Bummer. I asked my favorite film photography expert Michael of Spürsinn on what to do and he finally resorted to bathing the film in undiluted fixer for a minute, just to see if that would do something.

But it didn't.

We rinsed the film, pulled it out of the spiral and lo and behold, it was transparent, just with a pretty strong tint that looked opaque from certain angles. Super weird.

I forgot about the experiment until a few minutes ago, when I began scanning some of the pictures.

Turns out the Efke 50 / T-Max developer combination produces great contrast that still leaves enough room to work on in the (digital or analog) darkroom.

Here's a negative scan straight from the scanner, uncorrected:

And here it is with just a slight black point adjustment and a tiny raise in exposure level:

I love it when the photos are 80% where I want them straight from the camera and they still give me enough headroom to play with. I'll file this film/dev combination under B as in BINGO!

What's your favorite combination?