Frugal Film Project January 2026 - Winter Hikes at Caesar Creek State Park
My 1934 Rolleicord with HP5+ film
New Year’s Day 2026 found Renee and I hiking at the 50 Springs area at Caesar Creek State Park. It was a cold and blustery day, but still was great to get out and get some exercise out in nature. I brought with my my 1934 Rolleicord loaded with a roll of Ilford Hp5+ film. Given the lowish light I decided to rate the film at 800 instead of 400, knowing that in development I would develop it longer than normal to “push” it to 800.
The old Rolleicord is fun to use, with the only issue being that the viewfinder can be very dim in low light. Outdoors in cloudy to sunny conditions its not too bad, but most of the time I found myself using the flip-up magnifier to check critical focus. This practice yielded sharp results every time.
I didn’t finish the roll for our New Year’s Day hike, so I went back out the next day to another area in Caesar Creek called Pioneer Village. I’ve shot there many times in the past, as its a great place for photographing the many old buildings in different types of weather and conditions. It was another cold, blustery morning but the sun was out, giving some nice shadows and lighting the sides of the buildings nicely.
I stopped at one more location near the marina to finish the roll and head home.
The next day I developed it in Rodinal, mixed to a 1:25 ratio with filtered water. Development time to push it to 800 was 8 minutes at 68F. I did a water stop bath, and then fixed it with Ilford’s Rapid Fixer. Scanning was done the next day on my Epson V850 flatbed scanner with a betterscanning.com film holder and ANR glass. Below are all 12 images from the roll. Click on the first one to open in a pop-up window and scroll through.
What do you think?
The old Carl Zeiss Jena f/3.8 Triotar lens renders images in a way that is hard to describe. It can be very sharp in the center when you nail focus, with fall-off in sharpness near the corners. There’s also a little vignette at times depending on the aperture chosen. Out-of-focus areas have a nice, creamy look and often give that retro vibe like the images really were shot sometime far off in the past. Maybe the best word to use to describe it is “vintage”. I also own two other Rolleicords that have the f/3.5 version of the same lens, but they tend to look a little more “clinical” by comparison.
Most of the images above were shot somewhere between f/8 and f/16. The lens goes all the way to f/32, but I try to stay around f/16 to f/22 at most as sharpness isn’t great stopped all the way down.
I’d say 2026 is off to a great start with my first roll of film already done for the FFP and posted. I’m really looking forward to exploring some different themes with the camera and film combination, and think that 12 frames per roll is a more realistic plan than the 36 images I’ve shot for the last two years of the project.
Are you participating in the Frugal Film Challenge for 2026? What camera and film are you shooting this year?
As always, thanks for reading!
Jeremy