I’ve been shooting a lot of B&W 35mm film these days and last weekend I though I’d shoot out my last roll of Kodak HIE High Speed Infrared film. This has been sitting in the deep freeze for some time - expired in February 2009 - and it seemed to be time to use it. SO I loaded it into the trusty Pentax LX and screwed a deep red filter onto the FA 20-35mm f4 lens.

Here are the best two shots of the roll. I have to confess that I am a little disappointed - I had hoped that the last roll of this great film would result in something really interesting, but not…

Well - at least the film seemed to be fine even 4+ years out of date. I shot it at ISO 200, bracketed most of the shots, and developed in Rodinal 1:50 for 15 minutes. (The Rodinal is probably about as old as the film.) It was definitely too dense and over developed which puzzles me, since I’ve used that developer and time frequently in the past. Vuescan’s multiple exposure setting (formerly long exposure pass) saved the highlights, even though each batch of 12 exposures took many hours to scan.

So - this film is gone for me. I have some Rollie IR that is also getting old that I need to burn up, and somewhere here I have some old odd-ball IR surveillance film that someone sent me a few years back that I need to use as well, plus there’s some rolls of 120 SFX down in that deep freeze… So I guess my IR film days are not totally over, but my time with HIE is finished.