Category: IflordFP4

Street Photography with Ilford FP4

The Moose on

Black and white has been interesting to me for years, but I haven’t been shooting it much since I started with film again. I’ve used some HP5+, and one roll of Delta 50 that I pretty much universally underexposed, and that’s it for true B&W. I also shot some of the XP2 that you develop in C41, and I like it, but that was 6 months ago. So I grabbed a few rolls each of some film stock that interests me and one of my cameras will be loaded with B&W all the time until I have tried them all.

The stocks I chose were Delta 50, Delta 100, FP4+ 125, and XP2 Super all from Ilford, and Acros from Fuji. Maybe I have an HP5 roll here, too, I would have to look in the refrigerator to see. I also have a bunch of Delta 3200 and XP2 in 120, which was a gift from the man I bought my GX680 from. I’ll try to get to now that I have a third back for the 680s and can keep B&W loaded and still have a back for slides and negatives. I’d really like to convince some people to sit for portraits with the 120, and I learned that Delta is actually native a lot slower than 3200 (800 speed? I’d have to look) so I could probably get some with acceptable grain even doing something stupid like street photography with 10 lbs of medium format camera hanging from my neck. I might haul that around the village and ask people to let me take portraits as a lark. But for now it’s 135.

You might remember the first roll, which was was FP4 in my F6. I posted some samples here a couple weeks back. It’s a usable film, and I even think this one was a genuine winner:

I did the same with the current roll of FP4, just taking shots of random subjects. I was using the F3 this time, which has a center weighted meter instead of a matrix like the F6. I don’t know if I’ve bonded with it yet, though it is a great camera. I definitely underexposed the portrait I shot not realizing it was 80% center weight. I need to remember it’s like the middle setting on the F6 switch when I’m searching for shadows. Maybe narrower, even, as the FM3a is 60% CW. The F3 is almost a spot by comparison.

I got some good shots, and I didn’t always shoot when the light was great because, frankly, I was getting impatient to burn the roll and get it processed. I didn’t bother worrying about the subject matter either, I just wanted to shoot something.

I’ll say this, FP4 is good film. I like it, It’s more contrasty than I expected, and it can be super sharp. I’m really impressed with the details I pulled out, even in tougher light. I will be happy to shoot this in bright light in the future, and I might even do some DR5 processing and make slides.

Here’s a dump of some of the roll. Random subjects. Random lighting. Even a bunch of balloons, one of each color, like I’d planned a test. I got lucky on that one. Behold!

Ilford FP4 and Ektar

The Moose on

Working with some older manual cameras the last week. Specifically an F3 and an FM3A. The Ektar shots here are from the FM3A, the B&W are Ilford FP4 in the F6. I think the Still I Stand shot is a winner, the rest are mostly trash. Partly because they’re just snapshots as I was excited to try out my new old camera, but also because the scans are kind of terrible.

There are horizontal stripes in the skies of many of the shots, especially the Ektar. I’ve had this issue in the past and it is not on the negatives (or the slides, I’ve had it with Provia, too, and with medium format negatives) and I’m just not sure why it’s happening. At this point I’m convinced the lab’s software is shit, and these are JPEG artifacts, as they are almost exactly what happens when I try to reduce size on a digital shot from the Z6.

The thing is, I don’t get why this happens from the originating scan. Shouldn’t it be like a full sized digital image? Are they reducing it to make it smaller for the download and just overcompressing the jpeg? Whatever it is, they claim they can’t seem to see it at the lab and, frankly, I can’t not see it. They say nobody else has the problem, but I just cannot imagine how that is true! I don’t know if I want to even bring it up again, I’m getting a reputation as the complainer, but I’m to the point where I think I’m going to have to rig a light source for my camera and a macro lens and just scan my own.

Whatever. I’m just really fucking annoyed. Here’s what I came up with. I didn’t bother to pick and choose, this is any of them that aren’t blurry because I can’t focus.