Lucky SHD100

Lucky SHD100 is one of those Chinese films that you can sometimes find really cheap. When I was in Bejing a few years ago it cost 2USD a roll in a film shop (that was unfortunately closed when I was going there to buy some).

It has in general a bad reputation, due to lacking quality control and probably due to it being a Chinese made emulsion.

The history of the Lucky brand, and its company, Lucky Group Corporation, is a bit difficult to find good information about. Based on their web site, it seems they are doing mostly B2B stuff. Their English site is pretty thin on information, but if you use Google Translate on the Chinese site you can find more information.

Here is a list of their product categories

I found this piece of information on the English site:

China Lucky Group Corporation (herein after referred to as “China Lucky”) is the wholly-owned subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. China Lucky, formerly known as Baoding Cinefilm Manufacturing Factory was founded in 1958.

China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is a state-owned corporation for the Chinese space program, so my guess is that whatever knowhow China Lucky had, was crucial for the Chinese space program so they just “bought” it. It is not a small company, according to the Chinese site:

The annual production capacity of silver salt film is 20 million square meters

1 square meter of film is around 17 rolls of 135/35 film, so I think just a small fraction of that coating is 35mm film for cameras. My guess is that most of it is X-ray film.

This is what they say about SHD100 themselves:

Lucky's new generation SHD100 is a full-color medium-speed black and white film with high definition and large latitude. It has good physical and mechanical properties, can meet the requirements of use under high temperature and high humidity conditions, and has strong anti-adhesion and scratch resistance. Widely used in indoor and outdoor professional and amateur photography, such as portrait photography, advertising photography and other artistic creation photography, landscape and travel photography. The use of a new type of silver halide grain emulsion enables the film negative to be magnified at large magnifications and still achieve excellent clarity and ultra-fine grain effect. With Lucky black and white painted statues or other similar photographic papers, good results can be obtained.

Alright, enough back story. I’ve shot 3 rolls of the stuff, recently expired, refrigerator stored. My general feeling is that this is s a very good film for the price. Much better than all the Agfa Aviphot rebrands that are circulating these days. Dare I say, better than Fomapan too. I shot all rolls at box speed and I think that’s a pretty accurate speed for this film. Maybe go down to EI 80, and reduce the development time a tiny bit. The highlights can block up pretty easily.

The main downside to this emulsion is that the anti-halo layer is really weak. Bright skies will give a halo in areas of high contrast. That might be part of the charm in some cases though.

Here is an example of what I am talking about:

Lucky SHD100, Pentax LX, SMC-M50/1.4, Adox FX-39 II, 12min 20c

Something that is positive is that this film is actually pretty sharp. I thought the results were particularly good in FX-39. The grain is not “in your face” but it has a very nice pop to it in areas with lots of micro-contrast. Example of this is here, if you look at the dogs fur:

Lucky SHD100, Pentax LX, SMC-M50/1.4, Adox FX-39 II, 12min 20c

Here are some more example shots. First two are with an Lomo LC-a and the rest of them are with a Canonet G3 QL19. All developed in XTOL 1+1 for 8min. I’d say that the XTOL time was a little on the low side and my FX-39 1+19 time of 12min was a little on the long side. I would probably increase the XTOL time with 30-60sek and reduce the FX39 1+19 time with the same amount, next time I develop this film.

If I ever come across this film for 2-3USD/pcs again, I would not hesitate to buy a brick or two. This is an excellent low-cost film for every day shots. The three rolls I have shot had zero defects or quality issues. There is very very little base fog in my rolls, no weird scratches, nothing like that. It seems though that Lucky does coating runs quite rarely, and you never know when you can get hold of any. Macodirect sometimes has some, but with a quite steep markup compared to getting it locally in Asia, at 5€/pcs.

There exists also a Lucky SHD400, but it is very rare. I have never seen any rolls of it for sale, anywhere. With the current film resurgence, let’s hope Lucky start doing more coating runs and maybe reintroduce the 400 speed film.

Alright, that is it for this time. Let me know if you have any questions, and please take a look at the shop if you find something you like.

Orwo N74 aka Lomography Berlin in D96

Since I have a bottle of D96 I got for my Double-X experiment I decided I should get some more bw cine films to try out with it.

So I grabbed the two Orwo films that Lomography sells, Berlin and Potsdam. Lomography Berlin is actually Orwo N74 and Potsdam is UN54.

The company behind Orwo, Filmotec, is actually selling the next gen version of N74 now called N75 but I think Lomography got a good deal on an expired bulk roll or something because there is some serious base fog on this film.

I rated the film at EI 250-320, and I think 320 is pretty close. 250 was okey but depending on metering, it was at pushing midtones slighly too high up in my opinion.

I developed the film for 8,5min at 20c. Would I do it again I would go for 9-9,5min. It was ever so slightly underdeveloped. Missing a little bit of zing in the highlights.

It was probably a fluke but I had to fix the roll a second time after washing and drying. I usually fix for 5 minutes but I had some milky residue left around the sprocket holes. 99% sure it has nothing to do with the film itself, but anyway, these blogs are my also my personal notes too about these films..

The images are very grainy for a Iso 400 film. It is much grainier than ex HP5 while being 1/3-2/3 stop slower. It has a nice acutance, the images feel sharp and crisp but they feel a little bland.. at least when scanned. I haven’t done any wet prints yet.

The price is not great if you get the Orwo films branded as Lomography. If you got bulk rolls it would be around half price which is much more reasonable. Honestly, Hp5/Fp4, Delta 100/400, Tmax 100/400 are all so much better films than this.

If you want grain, and a certain cinematic look, this could be something worth trying. But for the general bw shooter, I would not recommend Orwo N74.

Alright, here are sample shots. Take a look in the shop if you see something you like and please support my blog!

Kodak Double-X 5222 in D96

Finally I managed to score some D96 developer (thanks retrocamera.be!). It is a bottle of Bellini D96 that I got just for trying out Double-X with the developer it was meant for.

D96 is supposedly a lower contrast developer than D76 for example, which might explain why this is a good match. D96 is a developer made for motion picture film (which Double-X is). D96 is used as a stock solution (meant for replenishment systems) so you just reuse the solution until exhausted.

I found that Double-X in Xtol was a bit too hot. The contrast worked pretty well for street photo style pictures, but I prefer to add contrast with higher paper grades or after scanning, rather than having high contrast negatives to begin with. Information that was never recorded can never be recovered, and it’s much easier to add contrast the way you want than to remove it. Kind of like salt in food, you need to have some, but if you add too much before it’s on the plate you can’t save the dish.

Here is what I wrote about Double-X in XTOL 1+1 a couple of years ago. Since I wanted this to be a fair comparison, I rescanned that roll since I scanned it last time with a Plustek. Here are example pictures of Double-X in XTOL 1+1, developed for 9,5min, 20c:

Alright and finally here’s some sample pictures. D96, 6,5min in 20c. Scanned with the Kodak Pakon F135+, my custom 16bit workflow.

In my eyes, it has more grain when developed in XTOL. Also, it feels like there is an S-curve when developing in XTOL, the darkest shadows get crushed Look at the umbrella the man is holding, and look shadowy part of the ceiling in the walkway.

Now compare to the roll developed in D96, look at the ice, or the snow next to the men working on the truck. Look at the shadow side of the phone. The tones are nice and long, with lots of midrange. Also, the images look almost grainless in D96, they’re not in reality, Double-X is very grainy compared to other modern emulsions of this speed range, but in these scaled down pictures there is almost no detectable grain.

That’s it for this time. Let me know your thoughts, and check out my shop for issues of my zine. Any support is appreciated, all money will go into keeping this site running.

Kodak 2254 aka Kodak Superslow ISO1.6 in C41

Time for another experimental film. I got two rolls of this stuff from my friend Nathan last year (or was it the year before?) It has been on my todo-list for a while now, but since the film is so incredibly slow it is difficult to shoot during autumn or winter up here in the north where we get so very little daylight during those seasons.

Kodak 2254 is actually something called an “intermediate film”. This is how wikipedia defines it:

“An intermediate is produced by exposing film to the original camera negative. The intermediate is then used to mass-produce the films that get distributed to theaters. Color grading is done by varying the amount of red, green, and blue light used to expose the intermediate. This seeks to be able to replace or augment the photochemical approach to creating this intermediate.”

The full name of the emulsion at hand is “VISION3 Color Digital Intermediate Film 5254 / 2254”, so it is a color film, and made for making digital intermediates. Instead of exposing the original film on this film, you scan the original negative, make your changes and then make another negative with a laser printer. So this stuff is never meant to be shot in a camera, or in daylight. Take a look at the data sheet for more information about it.

For those reasons, the film has no remjet. It is an ECN2 film, so it is actually cross processed in this experiment. In my experience processing ECN2 films in C41 gives you a little bit extra contrast and also some wonkyness with colors. But as you will see, this film has some weird colors to begin with, so it is not a big deal in this case.

Looking at the curves from the data sheet, we can already guess a little bit about what it will look like:

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As we can see in the spectral sensitivity curves, the three layers have very different sensitivity. The yellow layer (which gives blue tones) is higher than the magenta layer (which gives green tones) and we have very little sensitivity in the cyan (red tones). The B and G curves also go very close together in the shadows and midtones which will probably lead to some color crossover in blues and greens, especially in C41 (but i am not an expert in this so I might be wrong here)

After developing in my Fuji Hunt C41 kit, I scanned the roll with my Kodak Pakon F135+ with the integrated PSI software. The pictures came out very very blue at first, the color correction software probably had no idea what was going on. The orange film base is also much more red than normal color negative films. I did color corrections and adjustments to try to get the images as close to real life as I could.

It does have a special kind of look, some colors are very muted and desaturated while blues have a lot of pop. Also since a normal exposure in sunlight is much longer than usual, you also get some interesting effects. Clouds go blurry, people and cars are blurry, and there is something “weird” with the light that sticks out for me.

So do I like this film? I think it’s another of those gimmick films that are so popular these days. Companies buying short ends from film labs, putting them in cartridges and making a few bucks. Nothing wrong with that really, but I wish people would not be so much in search of gimmicks and experiments, and instead shoot more professional films like Fujifilm 400H so that those could survive. Every new film shooter goes directly to the experimental films, pushing bw films ten stops, doing stand development in coffee and beer, etc etc.

What is interesting with this film though is the very slow speed. You could for example shoot in a studio with high power strobes and still shoot wide open apertures. Or do reaaally long exposures in broad daylight. Or several hour long exposure at night.

Alright, that’s it for this time. Check out my shop for issues of my film photography zine (and maybe other stuff if you are reading this in the future).

Fortepan 100 and 200

Forte is one of those companies that is dearly missed. It used to be a big company that produced photographic paper and film. It got started in 1922 when Kodak decided that they were gonna start up a subsidiary in Vác, Hungary. At their peak they produced 3 million square meters of paper and 1 million square meters of film, every year. They had around 60 different papers and three different films (possibly four, I am uncertain). Fortepan 100, 200 and 400. The fourth one, is something called Portraitpan. I quote: “The main difference between the portrait film and standard Forte Pan 100 is the film coating. Both the base and the emulsion sides of Portrait Pan have a matte retouching surface” (source)

So as I have understood it, Portraitpan is just the regular Fortepan 100 but both sides of the film had a matte surface so you could retouch it. Portrait films went out of fashion when retouching negatives went out of fashion.

I have been for the past year or so trying to find some fresh-ish rolls of Fortepan but it has been difficult. Fortepan was also sold as Orwopan and I found a couple of rolls of Orwopan 100. After opening the box I can confirm that this is indeed Fortepan, exact same backing paper etc.

I shot a couple of rolls of 100 and 200 each, in 120. For some reason this film doesn’t age very well. They seem to have lost a lot of speed even though both are expired at -95 (which is a while ago sure, but not THAT bad). I exposed my first two rolls at ISO25 and this was way optimistic it seems. The ISO200 roll was probably better stored since it had almost no base fog, but everything was way underexposed nevertheless.

Also the emulsion seems to filled with specs and dust, which I cannot explain any other way than it was already there when it came from the factory.. so quality control was probably not the highest priority over at Fortepan in the early 90s.

Here are a few shots from the ISO25 shots. Fortepan 100 was developed in HC110 dil. B for 4,5min and Fortepan 200 for 7,5min. I added 5ml of BZT 1%, which was probably too much at this rating. The Fortepan 100 roll has some base fog, the other roll was very clear.

Next, I tried another stop of exposure, so E.I. 12 together with prolonged development time. I did Hcc10 dil b for 6min for Fortepan 100 and 8min for Fortepan 200. I skipped the BZT this time, and now the negatives are looking much better. The base fog on the ISO100 roll is clearly visible now, but on the ISO200 roll it is nice and purple. However, there are backing paper issues on these rolls too. It reminds me of expired Shanghai, which also gets totally destroyed when it is expired or stored in humid conditions.

Here are some example shots. From Fortepan 200:

And here are some shots from Fortepan 100:

Tonality-wise, both of these look pretty nice. They aren’t super grainy, very creamy nice midtones. But the backing paper feels like Shanghai backing paper, ie. very bad quality. And as I said, there is dust and specs in the emulsion. It is also the curliest film I have ever experienced. It curls so much, every time I open my negative binder the sheet with the Forte200 in it will just jump out and become a roll. It is a shame that Forte doesn’t exist anymore, but these three issues would probably prevent me from having this as my go to film emulsion.

I have 2 rolls left of Fortepan 200 in 120 format, both expired 1992. If anybody wants to give these a try, I will give them to you for free if you pay the postage for it.

This blog post took me over 6 months to complete. I am happy to have it done, it was a hassle to find film to shoot and shoot 4 rolls of film. And none of the images are really usable, it did not feel worth all the effort. I just hate the look of backing paper stuck to the emulsion. Oh well, hope this benefits somebody out there at least. That’s it for this time, please write a comment with your thoughts!

Shanghai GP3 aka CatLABS X 80

Alright here is another blog post that has been long in the working. Last year I got myself a 4x5 camera, and was looking around for cheap film to learn the camera with and fell on Shanghai GP3 straight from China. I don’t remember exactly what I paid but I remember it was not very much compared to other alternatives.

I also got a few FRESH rolls of GP3 in 120, as the previous time I tried it the rolls were a few years out of date and totally destroyed by backing paper issues and fogging.

The emulsion is the same in sheet film and medium format, but Shanghai has the absolutely worst quality backing paper. It is too thick, so you get fat rolls, too large spacings, and you will often times lose the last frame due to this. Then the adhesive on the strip is weak, and often the entire thing will just pop open in your backpack, and then you will ruin some more shots. There is often times defects in the film too, like dirt, dust, or unevenness in the emulsion.

All this is also true for the Catlabs “version”, which is exactly the same film but in a nicer box. For some reason the Catlabs people have said that oh no this is not the same film, they just produce it for us, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is just GP3. I doubt the chinese have the capacity to produce more emulsions, and Catlabs does not have the expertise to develop a new one.

The sheet film obviously doesn’t have any problems like this. They come in nice boxes, the sheets are nice and thick, I don’t have much to complain about really!

I would rate these films at ISO80, so not far off box speed really. I have developed in XTOL, Fuji SPD and the emulsion does seem to work nicely with pretty much everything.

As for the image quality, I actually really like the way GP3 looks. There is something “creamy” about the midtones that I enjoy. The grain is what you would expect for an ISO100 film, it is sharp enough, the film prints easily in the darkroom. If the backing paper was slightly better I could easily see myself shooting more of this. And as for large format, I recommend it for sure. It is a cheap way to get into large format without breaking the bank. You can afford to do some mistakes with this film instead of say, Portra which will cost you an arm and a leg for a box of 10 sheets.

Here are my development times:

120 - Fuji SPD 1+1 @ 20c - 7min 15sek
120 - XTOL 1+1 @ 20c - 10min
120 - Rodinal 1+50 @ 20c - 15min
4x5 - XTOL 1+2 @ 20c - 14min

Here are some pictures (square ones are 120, other ones are 4x5):

Alright that is what I had for you this time. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Lomography Metropolis 35mm

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..

Oriental Seagull 400 in Xtol 1+1

Did another roll of Oriental Seagull 400, aka rebranded Kentmere. I could not find any times for Oriental Seagull in Xtol so I did the time stated for Kentmere 400. Lo and behold, it was perfect. No surprise there really. Anywho, I often hate on Kentmere, but it is a cheap film and honestly there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that there are better films out there.

But here are some Pakon scans from that roll:

For a previous post about Oriental Seagull 400 see here.

Alright that’s it for this time, just a short update.

Fuji Neopan 400

Fuji films have a cult following, even though Fuji kind of ignores its fans and keeps discontinuing more and more films. Few films are as known as Velvia, or Fuji Acros. Velvia is still around, but who know for how long. I give it a couple of years, then I think Fuji will discontinue all of the film production.

Anyhow, this blog post is about one of the fallen ones, Neopan 400. When you talk about Neopan 400 with someone who has shot it in the past, they get misty eyed and start reminiscing about its tonal scale, it’s great grain, how fantastic it was to push process.

I have recently aquired around 15 rolls of pretty fresh Neopan 400, and have these past few months managed to shoot two of them. One was developed in Fuji Super prodol, aka Fuji SPD, 1:1. 20c, 7 min. The other one I did in HC110 dil. E (1+47) for 8min in 20c.

I have not yet tried any push processing, but I might. I think SPD might be a good fit, of which I have a few packs left (I’ll write about this Japan only developer at a later date).

The first thing that hit me was how it renders blue skies, they are a bit less white compared to other films I have used. Slightly reduced blue sensitivity or just great highlights? I don’t know. It seems to really keep detail in the highlights anyhow.

Grain in SPD is around the same as HP5, in HC110 it is less than HP5. Around same as Tmax400 I’d say, but with better tonal scale. I prefer it in HC110 I think, but looks like I got a little bit more speed out of SPD. Should have shot the HC110 at ISO320.

Here is a 100% crop in SPD:

neopan400-8.jpg

And here is a 100% crop in HC110:

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Here are some sample pics, first when done in SPD:

And some pics in HC110:

Summary

I really like this film. It shares a lot of its characteristics with Acros 100, and I can very easily get the type of feel to the images that I want. I just set white and black point and pull the midtones down, way down. And it look so rough, grim, sad. It evokes exactly those feelings in me that I often want to portray with my images, the underbelly of the big city life. The loneliness of being in a big crowd, the absurdity of the way of life in a modern big city.

Alright, that’s it for today. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or thoughts.

ORWO NP22 in HC110 dil. E

Here are some shots from a roll of 35mm ORWO NP22, expired in -91. Shot it at ISO32, down from original ISO125. Developed in HC110 dil. E (1+47) for 12min at 20c.

This roll has been well preserved, it wouldn't have needed this much overexposure. Almost no fogging, no weirdness. A little grainy for such a slow film but, otherwise just fine.

Don't have that much else to say about this right now, here are some sample shots.

Silberra Pan 160/200 first impressions

A while back a friend (thanks Nikolay!) from St Petersburg came to Finland so I went down to visit him, along him he had a small bag of Silberra films that at the time were not possible to buy anywhere else than in person in St Petersburg.

During winter it's really dark up here, so it took a while for me to shoot a couple of rolls, but today I developed and scanned the first two rolls. A Pan160 and a Pan200.

First off.

Pan160

Developed in D76 1+1, at 20C, for 19 minutes. Shot with a Pentax Spotmatic, mix of Pentax glass, a Helios 44-2 and an Industar 50-2.

Here are some example pictures from the lovely towns of Luleå and Oulu:

And here is a 100% crop: 

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Pan200

Developed in D76 1+1, at 20C, for 16 minutes. Shot with a Lomo LC-A.

Here are some example pictures:

Here is a 100% crop:

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Summary

Agfa traffic surveillance film, fine grain, hard contrast, goes up to the IR range, doesn't curl, clear film base.. is this.. is this JCH Streetpan for a fraction of the cost? I see some striking similarities, except at a lower film speed.

I gotta say the Pan160 looks pretty good for cityscapes, especially since I like a certain grimey look. I pull midtones way down, and I hate it when I get a mushy look when I want it to be generally dark/moody (Delta3200 worst offender). I'm not sure I would like this for portraits and such. Can't be sure, since I haven't tried, but solely based on the tonal range/feel. Film speed seems to be actually 160, none of that weird Rollei shit where film speed is two stops lower of advertised.

Pan200 looks equally fine, however, we are talking about a 0.33EV difference. A third of a stop. B/W film has so good latitude that if you expose two shots a third of a stop away from each other, there is no visible difference. So what is the point of this film? Honestly I can't say. It looks like the grain is a bit larger/visible compared to Pan200. I think you could might as well just push the Pan160 half a stop to 250 if you needed a tiny bit more speed. Maybe they just wanted to release a couple of different emulsions for the same range to then gauge what the public opinion is, and focus the efforts on either 160 or 200 depending on what people prefer?

Little difficult to judge the qualities of Pan200 this time since I shot with the Lomo LC-A.. Exposure is a little bit hit and miss, focus is off on a lot of shots, etc. Maybe Pan200 has qualities I am missing due to this. Luckily I have another roll of each left.

Just the fact that Silberra films have come out makes me happy. We got JCH Street pan, the re-release of Tmax3200, Ilford going still going strong. The chinese are back in the game with Lucky SHD100 and Shanghai GP3. I am not worried that I won't be able to get hold of the film i need for my own stuff in the long term. Black and white film seems to be going strong right now, and the worst dip is behind us. Both Pan160 and Pan200 I could definitely see myself using, especially at the price point I got these for..

Anyhow, let me know if you have any questions or if you would to read more about a certain subject I touched on in this post! Until next time.

[Edit:]

Silberra confirms my suspicion about Pan160/200: "PAN160 is alternative for PAN200, the latter shall be referred as Limited Edition at the moment. We'll decide later which one shall survive."

Superia Venus 800

Got my first roll of Venus 800 back from the lab. First impressions - I like it. The grain is.. obviously there, it's a pretty grainy film. But it is not that "in your face", it's kinda subdued, soft somehow.

The color palette really suits a cityscape, especially if you don't want to have bright colors. It's kinda brown in colors. Neutral, almost a bit unsaturated.

These shots are from my trip to Budapest this new years. I wish I had another roll or two, since Fuji will probably discontinue this film stock soon. Let's hope there's some left in Tokyo next time I'm there.

 

Orwo NP27 in D76 1+1

Another old film from the other side of the iron curtain. The famous Orwo films are not that unknown, they are not bad films either.

First impression, it curls a lot, but not longways as usually, but the short side is U shaped.. makes scanning a bit of a hassle since it's difficult to get it into the neg holder.

I exposed this one at ISO100 even though it's a ISO400 film originally, but this particular roll was 2 decades out of date. One stop per decade really seems to work well. I'd say D76 1+1 works just fine for this film too, the grain is pretty harsh but not in a bad way. There is this grimey look that I usually like. I wouldn't recommend this film for portraits though, at least this old. On the other hand I don't like much grain in my portraits.

I have a couple of rolls left, next time I'll try HC110. Here's some shots!

D76, 1+1, 20c, 12min. normal agitation.

 

Agfa Copex HDP13 in Rodinal

When looking through ebay you often see the Agfa Copex microfilms for sale, dirt cheap. I bought a roll, and didn't realize it was unperforated. Do'h. Oh well, bought 35mm-120 converter from ebay. The thing didn't fit my bulk loading cassettes. Do'h! So I just crammed the thing into my hasselblad back and put some bubble wrap top and bottom and said fuckit.

Shot a couple of quick test rolls yesterday and today. Yesterday I fucked up the metering, the sun had already set and I must've looked wrong at my meter because I was doing about 1-2s exposures at f8, which did feel odd but I didn't think about it. Today I went out daytime and it was 1-2s again, so a little bit better results.

I rate this film at ISO25, but I'd say it's a little bit low. Maybe due to reciprocity failure, since pretty much every shot is 1+ seconds. Maybe due to this roll being old, there is no date markings on it and who knows how it's been stored.

What I can already say about this roll is this, it scratches sooo soo easily. And fingerprints stick to it immediately. DO NOT HANDLE THIS FILM WITHOUT COTTON GLOVES. Seriously. And when loading from the bulk roll into the cassettes, you cannot "tighten it" by just dragging the film in the roll, you will make serious scratches. When wet, you can scratch off the emulsion with your finger, it's really delicate.

The film base is clear PET plastic, so base fog is not an issue. Contrast however is, as I said this is a microfilm, made for taking high contrast pictures off documents. Not for pictorial stuff. So contrast control is the tricky part. I did 1h stand development in rodinal, 1+100, and it turned out pretty alright in my opinion.

Is it worth it shooting this film? For experimental stuff, sure. But due to it being so scratch prone and difficult to handle, it's not worth it as a daily film. If you want that gritty high contrast look with maximum sharpness and resolving power, there is some interesting images that can be had with this film stock.

Here are some examples. Note the weird form factor due to shooting 35mm in the Hasselblad.

 

Svema 65 expired in -88

Another old russian roll. This one was an even more expired Svema, souped in HC110. It turned out really good actually, some fogging but not that bad. Not too grainy, and whole range of grays. Interesting!

 

Tasma Foto 64 expired in -92

Funny stuff this Tasma. It comes in these tiny packages and the film is wrapped in black paper, but it does not come with a cartridge. You need to have your own to load the film is, since it's literally just a roll of film with around 36 exposures.

Had those since before so not a problem there.

My previous experiments with old expired soviet films were with Rodinal, this time I decided to try out the number one developer for expired films according to internet wisdom, HC110. Dilution B (1+31) at 20C for 7 minutes. I'd say this was a pretty good ballpark development time.

Apparently HC110 contains benzotriazole which is the most used anti-fogging agent, which makes it a good candidate for fogged films. You do loose a little bit of speed however with HC110 but I've already lost several stops worth of speed with these rolls due to age.

I shot the roll at around ISO12, ISO16 would be two stops so 12 is -2.33EV.. and 1992 was 25 years ago so that felt like a reasonable amount. It was barely enough though, and the shots would have benefited from a tad more light. But even at ISO12, shooting handheld starts to become really problematic. Unless you have a bright sunny day, it's basically impossible.

The camera I used was again my trusty Canonet QL19. My Pentax cameras hate this super curly stiff stuff that the soviets produced. The Canonet seems to have a different type of winding mechanism that kind of likes it that the film wants to curl up tightly on the take up spool.

Anyhow, here are some pictures!

 

Bergger Pancro 400 in Rodinal

Shot my first roll of Berggers new film a while back, and digitized the negs yesterday. Developed in Rodinal 1+50 for 22 minutes at 20C. Whoa, 22 minutes? That was a long ass time. I got bored of agitating after a while and got sloppy towards the end. Probably was one inversion every 2 minutes instead of 30sec or whatever.

First impressions are:

  • It's a bit grainy, isn't it? Sure its ISO400 and I developed in rodinal but.. still.. pretty rough grain?

  • I should've shot it at ISO320, I feel that everything is ever so slightly underexposed

  • Not a huge fan of the skin tones, the two portraits I have

  • It seems to hold up well in the highlights, if you look at the third shot here below, of the entrance to the hospital, in the upper left corner - look at the structure of the brighter part of the building. You can see the different shades, textures. Look at the shadow part straight below, it's all pretty murky

Interesting fact, the building in these shots is an abandoned sanitarium in northern Sweden for TBC patients. It is very very large and has been just sitting in the middle of a small village now for a decade, mostly forgotten.

 

Svema TSNL 65 pt.2

This is the second part of my experiments with Svema TSNL which should not really be processed in C41 since it expects an ancient process called C22. Read the first part here.

This time i developed at 25.5C for 11min, agitated for the first minute straight and then about every 30s an inversion. About twice as much agitation as last time.

I blixed for 11 minutes instead of 10min (or 6+4 really), also more agitation.

Exposed at around ISO12.

I'd say that the images are more "normal looking", but still have this weird monochrome picture overlayed over a weird random color cast. I kinda liked the extreme contrasty color blotches of last time, this looks more.. subdued.. I still think the silver did not get fixed away, either my blix has gone bad or I should be blixing for much longer. But difficult to judge, could be just harsh base fog.

Here are some example pics

 

First look at Svema FN125 expired in -94

Alright, first roll shot with the Svema FN125 I bought a couple of weeks ago. When I got the rolls, I thought the packaging was peculiar. Then I read another review about Svema film here where it says "Firstly, the film is provided as a roll without a cassette. That’s how it always used to be". So I bought some reuseable cassettes off ebay and didn't bother opening my films. Turns out however, that my films do already come in plastic reuseable cassettes. Well, more for me. Pretty cool though, they have the screw on top so they are easy to use again.

FN125 is a ISO125 film. It says ASA125 on the back. Wikipedia however says it is a 125 GOST/ISO 160 film. There seems to be variations on Svema film depending on when they were manufactured. Mine expired in -94, that might be a clue of sorts. Anyhow, I started shooting at ISO100 (who was I kidding). Dropped down to ISO80, then ISO64.

I developed this first test in Rodinal 1+50, for 12min with less agitation than I normally do. 1-2 min between inversions.

The film came out with lots and lots of base fog, and severly underexposed. I would guess it needs another full stop of light, and I probably should cut development time with a minute or two. I wish I had some HC110 at hand, alas I don't.. Maybe Ilford DD-X works well with expired films, does anybody know?

Here are some sample shots from todays expirement. To be continued..