My friend visited from a land-of-far and gifted me some boxes of 2012-2013 Arista 100 (rebadged Foma 100).
So, with nothing much else to do, other than dayjob, cleaning, filing for Small Business Disaster loan, taking care of a departed friend’s estate as I am the executor, cooking, cleaning, dog walking,… anyway, I have some times on my hands. Luckily, now I have a lot of films, and a reluctant but mostly cooperative model.
First up is the incomparable Cooke PS945. First effort was a MEH, because my XTOL just went up and died on me. Sadly, I have not taken much B&W in the last 6 months+, so… ah well.
I think I will standardize on dual-Pyro PMK from now on though, it works great, and lasts forever. Supposedly works best on 1 stop off the box ISO speed, and high contrast scenes, but I think it works just fine for normal usage. In these negatives, I metered at ISO 50, and then “push process” with extra time on development. I will probably blog about this process later…
Nice contrast and other than bringing up the shadow a bit under the cap, nothing much is done processing wise. The film is good even expired, at least as good as the Shanghai GP3. The aperture used on the PS945 was F8.
The next day, I tried similar photos with a “REXO Pictorialist” lens that I purchased from someone in Russia. There is zero information on the lens on the web, so it’s probably one of those rebadged lens from the early 1900s. Since it is supposed to be a soft focus “pictorialist” lens, I used F5.6 on these.
The scarf / bandana does not have Chinese writing on it, but just some lines. However, the way my wife happened to fold it created a word. Nice!
Highly competent lens for sure, and the bokeh is nice too. It’s lower contrast but nice and sharp where it counts. It’s not as good as the PS945, but then, what is 😉
