Dwindling Plus-X

A few years ago, I stumbled across a film retailer who had rolls from what must have been the last runs of Kodak's Plus-X 35mm black and white film for sale. I am not sure exactly when Kodak officially discontinued Plus-X, but these rolls expired in 2015 and 2016. 

Plus-X was the film I learned photography on in the 1970s. It was great general purpose film that, properly exposed, delivered fine grain images with deep blacks and a pleasant palette of grays. More importantly for me, it was easy to develop at home in Kodak's D-76 developer and very forgiving of processing errors. I can't tell you the times I lost count of my developing time or forgot to check the temperature of the D-76 and still ended up with very printable images.

Nostalgia got the best of me and I bought three dozen rolls of the last of this iconic film. I cold stored it all and shot the rolls with the 2015 expiration dates first. I'm down to less than 12 rolls now and spent a few moments savoring the moment as I loaded a roll into my Leica M2 this morning. Soon all of my Plus-X will be gone. Sad. This was just a wonderful, really wonderful film.