REMEMBERING KODAK HC FILM
LANDSCAPE, HC, Daytime, Botanical Gardens, High-Contrast by Nawfal Johnson Nur
This photo was made and inspired by my remembering using KODAK HC film. It’s been a long time – many years in fact since I last used KODAK HC. If I remember this correctly, I couldn’t find the HC film at all in Lincoln, NE (back in the day – before 1987), so when I visited Omaha, I would picked up a few rolls.
I wasn’t so good at the developing process involved with HC, but I did my best, in my make-shift dark-room / basement washroom. My prints usually ended up with the results I wanted: I wanted dark, non-detailed blacks (flat black), with dark-milky mid-tones and a few very white details in the sky.
The photo above ‘represents’ the type of photo I used to make with HC film and developer. However, the photo above is an image I took yesterday, with my NIKON digital camera at the Penang Botanical Gardens…at 4-something in the afternoon. And these are the results I wished to produce.
I made a shooting style with ViewNX 2, that starts the process of getting me to the HC look. Using the NIKON raw file (NEF – file), I have a lot of room to mess with contrast, exposure, lights & darks, and eventually, I get the HC style of image I want.
Well, I suppose it isn’t real HC results, but it is close to what I used to produce, and that’s OK with me.
