I recently returned from a twelve day “Best of Scandinavia” cruise. As well as taking many photographs and videos on my iPhone, I also took my Pentax ME-F with 28mm Pentax-M lens, loaded with a roll of Ilford FP4+. Each time the ship docked I took the camera ashore and took some views of the fantastic cities of Oslo, Tallinn and Stockholm.

As usual I home-processed the film in Paranol S, however when I took the reel from the tank and held it up after fixing, I could see the negatives were very thin. At first I wondered if the developer was too old, and then I realised that having looked up Paranol on the Digital Truth Dev Chart I had forgotten to press “search”, and so had inadvertently processed the film as if it were Rodinal, which has a shorter development time. Thus my film was two minutes underdeveloped. Disaster!

Fortunately with my Epson V550 scanner I was able to digitise the film and get some reasonable images from it. Unfortunately, the very thin negative revealed all the imperfections with the film, even though I had cleaned it to the best of my abilities. The result was some quite aged looking pictures. I did some light spotting in Apple Photos to take the worst of the spots and blemishes off, and decided that’s the best they were going to get.