Streets of Jakarta Roll #1

Everyday I jump into a car and am driven to my office. Many people here in Jakarta have drivers as the traffic is horrendous. So each day I sit in the back seat and watch the streets of Jakarta fly by. Countless times I am wishing I had a camera with me as I watch some wonderful scenes go by. 

I decided to give myself a bit of a assignment. I prepared one of my Nikon F3 with a roll of HP5+ film with a EI of 3,200. I want fast film to be able to set a fairly fast shutter speed and capture some scenes with a minimum movement. The assignment is to take it everyday to capture images from the back seat of the car. This is not street photography as there is no way to interact with my subjects, but it will give me something to do.

This is a raw test because I will be trying a few new things. First, I will be shooting from the back seat of a moving car. Secondly, the windows of the car is tinted so there is a light restriction. It is very hot so there is no way I will open the window. Finally, I am not sure of the quality of images I will get at EI 3,200.  I have done it before with mixed results. In dark environments with heavy shadows it works well. But in daylight it ends up creating too much contrast.

On the back of the camera, I have labeled everything I will need to know to develop and understand what I was trying to do. This tape will be used around the canister that holds the exposed roll.  I will then transfer it to the negative carrier that I use to film my negatives. It gives me everything I need to know and I have left room to note the results and any deviations i have made during development. 

The results were interesting.  I used Stand Development in Rodinal for one hour. This was simply because I did not have enough ID-11 to develop the rolls I had.  Usually I prefer stand development for low ISO films.  In this case I was shooting an ISO of 400 and an Exposure Index of 3200.

Amazingly I thought my issues would be the glass reflection and the movement of the vehicle however in the majority of the frames, it was the tough composition angles that threw most images off.  Below are some of my favorites of this roll.