I recently shot a roll of the new Metropolis film, and thought I’d write a short review.
Metropolis is an actually NEW new emulsion instead of rebadged cinefilm or pre-flashed films. It has been coated by Inoviscoat, a spin off from the old Agfa team. So ignoring whatever I think of this film, it is really good that stuff like this is going on and that Inoviscoat is keeping busy. This is the kind of action that will keep film alive for real. Finding some old dusty master roll of expired arial photo and lying about its actual ISO value will have no long term benefit. I wonder what the famous blogger will do once that master roll runs out..
Anyhow, Lomography themselves say about the Metropolis that it: “desaturates colors, mutes tones and makes contrasts pop.” I find marketing speak like this confusing. How can something both be desaturated and muted and also make contrasts pop? I don’t understand..
I shot this roll at ISO320, Lomography themselves say that is is ISO100-400 (which again is confusing, am film can only have one true speed, which is unknown). I think that this is probably really closer to ISO200 since several shots looked quite grainy and weak. Shots that were slighly overexposed looked better when rated at 320. However highlights were VERY quick to block up, so the latitude is less than one would expect with a color negative film. I would not give this another stop and rate at ISO100, I imagine you will have totaly white highlights everywhere.
For a ~200 speed film, this is really really grainy. So keep that in mind.
The colors then, which are the main point of this film. They are desaturated as stated, everything tends to get a cyan/blue tint. Since it is such an unnatural color palette, depending on how you scan you will get different results. Your scanner might try to color correct for this blue cast, and you will end up with much more normal looking images. (Also a problem when doing cross processing)
My Pakon did this to an extent I think, because several of the images lacked any weird color shits.
I think this film might look cool for portraits with “attitude”. I see no point in using this for landscapes, normal portraits, architecture, etc. It’s fun to try different stuff once in a while, but it will probably take a year or two before I will shoot this one again.
Here are some example pictures:
That’s it for this time. Stay tuned for another film review of a new Ilford offering..