great travelling film
Lovely film, with great contrast
Ilford FP4+ has been around pretty much forever. The original FP4 was released in 1968 and it's current 'plus' version in 1990. Despite its venerability it's the 'go-to' medium speed film for many, many photographers. It's sharp, low-grain and has beautiful tonality in pretty much any developer. It works for pretty much every genre of photography. It's also very flexible and will give good results at any rating from 50 to 200 ISO depending on the developer.
Do you have something red to photograph? Do you like the look of 90s photos? This is the film for you! Chunky grain and love for the colour red. I have also found blue skies and the ocean looks amazing on this film with a polarizer filter. Greens and yellows get quite muddy but you can't have everything with a brand new colour film and it does come out quite warm. The images are punchy and the highlights often clip out. I quite like the look. My one criticism is that the film light pipes for the first few photos and the end of the roll had messy quality control problems.
Ektar is probably the next best thing in colour after colour positive. It needs to be treated right to get good results and can be a bit of a diva but when it works it really pops. When you know you are going to have blue skies and lots of colourful subjects, Ektar is what I reach for.
Beautifully warm film that I really loved on a little trip to Shropshire. It brings out colour on the cloudiest of days, giving it the look of a fond memory. Would recommend if you want to take some nice photos of your mates.
Lets face it - HP5... you know what you are going to get. This is probably the great allrounder film stock - it will do everything fairly well, it's got a bit of grain, reasonable contrast and it's just... easy. I don't think it's a particular stand out film - but it is great when you just want something predictable, so I have been using it to test out camera bodies and lenses as it removes one of the variables nicely.
This is definately a "character film" - and I love it! I shoot all sorts of things but I am always looking to add drama into my photography and this provides that in spades.
I have shot this roll using a converted Zenza Bronica 135N back into a panoramic back and then set off to find some interesting subjects to photograph. I err towards landscape and travel photography for my "art" and architecture and interiors for my "work" to give a bit of contect as to what I am looking for in a film. This has provided me with some really nice, graphic, photographs with a reasonably fine grain and great contrast. It likes light... loads of light... but even in the gloom of the church photo (taken in the rain) it delivered the goods.
I shot at box speed and did normal development in D-76. Tones seem very smooth with hardly any grain. Seems really grain value. Easy to work with, dried straight. But I haven't compared with FP4 just yet so see if that's worth the difference.
I shot my first roll of this the other day and I'm really happy with it. But of course its good stuff, its a classic film from Kodak. Some scenes had deep shadows and bright windows. It was able to capture really more than enough graduation in both so I had plenty to play with when editing. I used K-76 for 9.75 minutes . I was very happy with the look of the negatives. I'm keen to try this in 120 now.
Found 35mm quite contrasty when my old lab developed it but using XP2 to test a new medium format camera the latitude turned out very forgiving (completely guessed some exposures and the rest were metered on phone) and the detail captured was incredibly pleasing.
Found this negative of one of my favourite photo shoots and it turns out it was Gold not Portra! Very pleasant. Skin tones come out well.
Decided to use a more expensive stock for a trip to New York and it was a fun roll to experiment with! The photos in the sun came out really nice.
I purchased a PURE 35 Camera out of curiosity, having watched Paul's persuasive video! I received the camera with two Tri-X 400 films and proceeded to shoot. I also had rolls of Kodak Gold 200, and when I had fully exposed the Tri-X, I loaded the Kodak Gold. All the images I took were during the last few weeks of August under sunny/bright conditions. I was a little skeptical about exposing 400 ISO film under sunny16 conditions when a shutter speed of 400ths and f/16 is recommended at f/9 and 1/120th second. I found that the Gold performed much better under similar conditions and while I am a little disappointed with the B/W shots, the colour images are much more satisfactory. Many of the B/W shots are very over-exposed and the camera will, I think, handle 400 ISO better under duller conditions when I anticipate it will do well for a point-and-shoot easy to use camera. I have included sample shots and hope that this review will help users achieve excellent results with this camera. One can see from the examples that under cloudy conditions the B/W works well. Under bright conditions the camera handles 200 ISO well.
Very easy to work with of you're still using a traditional darkroom. Tolerant of overexposure (which seems to help actually) and has pleasing tones.
Took me a while to get practiced enough to produce such good results, as it's a contrasty film, especially in direct sunlight. So you have to play to that rather than avoid it. Overexpose by a stop and then cut development time by 30% and you'll get a well exposed but flatter negative which prints beautifully at grade 3 or thereabouts.
Took this film on holiday to France, and it was great for daytime summery landscapes with really vibrant blues/greens and gorgeous warm tones! Good contrast and low grain. Also did well in low light/night time shots.
Don’t usually use black and white but experimented with a roll for a wedding as a back up and came out better than expected
Great fun film, would love to give it another go (bring it back!!)
gorgeous colours, works so beautifully in the summer
Glad I brought the bundle, lovely colours
Nice vivid colours. Cant see much difference to Gold apart from less yellow tint and grain is slightly finer too. Would recommend if you are on a budget.
Ok, it's not K400 - we can all agree that it's smoother. But it maybe isn't quite as good as it appears to be.
Definitely took me a bit of time to get what I wanted back from this after scanning. A lot of grain unexposed in some images that needed touching.
However, cheap summer time B&W film...yes. But using with a filter...perhaps not what it may be suited for.
