In the late 1980s Kodak introduced its new T-grain T-Max black & white emulsions.

I quickly adopted these new films in place of Kodak Tri-X and Kodak Plus-X.

After about a year of trial and error with the T-Max films, I opted to return to the more traditional non-T-grain emulsions. In the mean time I committed countless unrepeatable scenes to T-Max.

This photo features a freshly-painted (and only recently acquired) Guilford SD45 eastbound at Greenfield, Massachusetts. I exposed it on 120-size TMY (T-Max 400) film using my father’s Rollieflex Model-T.

Part of the difficulty was that I insisted on developing the film in straight Kodak D76 instead of the recommended T-Max developer. I did this to save money; when I was at RIT in Rochester (actually Henrietta), New York, photo students received basic photo chemistry as part of their lab fee, which meant I could get all the D76 I wanted without any additional cost, while T-Max developer had to be purchased.

What I saved in developer, I’ve paid 100-fold in laborious print making and difficult scanning.

However, using Adobe Lightroom I’ve finally been able to get decent tonality out of these 34 year-old photos.

The SD45 has always been a favorite locomotive, and at the time I was quite pleased to catch Guilford’s latest motive power in fresh paint.

Tracking the Light Posts Everyday!