found film (still more woe)

The Wirgin Junior folding camera arrived today. By the by, there's not a heck of a lot out there on this camera, though one site incorrectly refers to it as a 6x9 120 camera. It's not. It takes 6x6 shots.

But back to the woe: Compared with my experience with the Diana 151 that arrived the other day, in this case, I knew that the camera would arrive with an exposed roll of film inside. Still bummed about yesterday's mistakes, I took the time to re-research the best way to develop this film. Otherwise put, although I had developed old, long expired verichrome pan in the past--successfully so, I might add--I didn't want to leave anything to chance. An added complication (and additional motive for conducting re-research) was that I was out of Diafine, my usual go-to developer for old b/w films. Following the advice found here (. . .though I have to admit I was conflicted, thinking that maybe I should follow instead the advice found here?) I developed the film in a 1:14 solution of HC-110 for 8 minutes, agitating for the first 30 seconds and then twice every 30 seconds for the remainder of the development. After the fix and before the rinse I took a peek at the end of the film and was delighted to see that I hadn't botched the development. The truth is, the past couple months have been really sad (or as I'd like to think of them, unlucky) for me where found film has been considered. And by "found film" I mean specifically film shot by another, later found and developed by me. . .this as opposed to finding other people's developed negatives. I call that "just plain lucky." I trashed two rolls as a result of using what turned out to be way-exhausted Diafine. Argh. And then there was the C-41/C-22 debacle yesterday. So with this film, I really needed a win. Or, if not a win, I just needed not to %$&!# this one up too. So, the good news is that I ended up with this image:










. . .a portion of which I'm really quite fond.








and this too. definitely a more abstract-y version of the snow and tree line above. and then there was one other image on the roll--a really uninteresting image of a squirrel sitting in snow. Problem was, the squirrel was so small and the snowy landscape so ginormous you had to magnify the image a lot to figure out the speck on the snow is, in fact, a squirrel.

But that was it. Nothing else on the film. Boo. Not the best couple of weeks (or has it been months?) for me where making pictures has been concerned.