A Few Frames for 127 Day

A few frames shot with my Sawyer's Mark IV and Rerapan 400

CAMERAS

sonny rosenberg

1/28/20232 min read

127 Day is a fun online event run by J.M. Golding (who makes the most incredible lumen prints I've ever seen, I'm the lucky owner of one, it's startlingly beautiful), it isn't a contest but an online exhibition open to anyone who takes a 127 photo on the given day. Somehow I missed the last one, but I wasn't going to miss this days event.

My cute as a button Sawyer's Mark IV was loaded with Rerapan 400, which I just learned is the same film as Rollei RPX 400. Even though today was a nice reprieve from the recent (and seemingly endless) bout of unusually cold weather, I just wasn't feeling tip top and decided some indoor shots would be the order of the day. Even though I've taken exactly 4.7 billion indoor shots recently, most have not been with the Sawyer's.

As I was developing this roll, I started to notice something odd about the negatives, but I couldn't really tell what was going on until I scanned them.

While I was quite careful in my focusing (unusual for me) some of the shots were quite soft, even in areas that I knew I had specifically focused on. I might have attributed this to the larger apertures that I was using for these indoor shots, but there were other anomalies. In some of the shots there were these odd obstructions (I don't know what else to call them) visible in the negatives, that weren't visible in the frame when I was shooting. Odd.

This all made more sense though, when I went to put my precious steel 127 spool back in the Sawyer's (this camera seems to operate much better with a metal rather than plastic film spool) and a couple of pieces of paper from the sealing tabs that keep the 127 film wound tightly were visible sitting on the taking lens. Usually I try to scrape, peel, pry the remnants of those paper tabs off, but this time I was a bit lazy when loading the camera. Is there a lesson here to be learned?

In any case, here are some of the "better" shots from this roll. They were developed in Adox FX-39II, which is a very nice developer that seems to work well on everything (so far) I'm just not thrilled that it's a one shot developer.