I was in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, overnight not long ago. I rented a room in a historic house near downtown, so I spent my evening having dinner and drinks in the center of the city. I brought my Nikon F3 along, with a 50mm f/1.8 Nikon Series E lens mounted. I set it to ISO 1600 and shot Ilford HP5 Plus as I walked around my former city after dark.
The good folks at Analogue Wonderland in the UK are now this blog’s Official Supplier of Ilford’s two traditionally grained black-and-white films, HP5 Plus and FP4 Plus. They send me these wonderful films in exchange for this mention when I use them and write about them. You can get your Ilford films from them, of course, but they offer film from at least a couple dozen other brands, both in color and in black and white.
I spent a good deal of time photographing the majestic Morris Performing Arts Center, which 101 years ago opened as the Palace Theater.
This is probably my favorite building in South Bend. You hardly expect a city this small to have a venue this grand.
This restaurant of contemporary southern cuisine is in the Palace’s corner storefront. I took my dinner here at the bar, where I also had a delicious pecan old fashioned cocktail.
I love it that HP5 Plus is so versatile that I can push it to 1600 at night. When I head out with a camera but don’t know exactly the conditions under which I’ll make photographs, HP5 Plus is a great film choice because I can make it work under most conditions.
I developed this film in HC-110, Dilution B. I like HC-110 for developing pushed film. Its normal developing times in Dilution B are short, meaning that extending the developing times to accommodate for the push still leads to a reasonably short developing time. Moreover, HC-110 takes pushing in stride.
Barnaby’s is a South Bend pizza institution. The downtown location opened in 1969 and I swear to you, everything in there is just as it was then, right down to placing your order by marking it on a card with golf pencils. Barnaby’s was originally a franchise chain with stores in Illinois, Indiana, and Florida (that I know of), but somewhere along the way the chain faltered and the remaining locations went independent. I know of three in the Chicago area, this one, and one in neighboring Mishawaka. Not all of them have kept to the original pizza recipe as the South Bend Barnaby’s has. I ordered a small pizza as a late-night second dinner, and kept half of it until the morning and ate it for breakfast.
This photo of an ATM shows the detail HP5 Plus is capable of even when pushed this far. TCU stands for Teachers Credit Union. For decades, you had to work in education to get an account here. My mom worked in the South Bend schools, so the whole family banked here. I still have accounts here, including my mortgage! TCU recently rebranded as Everwise Credit Union (yuck), but here and there evidence of its former name remains.
Do not enter? Enter here? Make up my mind already!
This statue is of Dr. Martin Luther King., Jr., and Father Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of the University of Notre Dame. Hesburgh was a noted champion of civil rights and appeared with King at civil rights rallies.
More photos turned out well on this roll than didn’t. Those that didn’t generally suffered from shake — even at EI 1600, shooting handheld I sometimes couldn’t hold the camera steady enough at the low shutter speeds I was getting. I didn’t bother processing most of those, but despite the shake in this photo I liked it well enough to keep it.
Thanks again to Analogue Wonderland for sending me this film so I could have some fun and share it with you.
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