ChrisR
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(Some of this has already appeared in the “New Film on the way” thread, but since that’s primarily about a different film, and because it might be of interest beyond TP Film & Conventional, I’ve re-written some of it here.)
A few years ago, I supported the Film Ferrania Kickstarter for their proposed new transparency film. They have had more than their share of troubles but seem to keep plugging away, and I’m still hopeful of getting my film. Along the way, they produced a black and white film, more or less as a production test I think, and named it P30. It’s apparently based on an old Ferrania black and white cinema emulsion, minimally updated for today’s chemicals. They decided to offer their Kickstarter supporters the chance either to swap their transparency film rewards for the P30 (in the preliminary version they call P30 ALPHA), or to buy up to 5 rolls in addition. I decided to do the latter, hoping to give them a bit more cash flow to (slightly!) increase their chances of delivering the transparency film. My 5 rolls arrived a couple of weeks ago.
A few days before, I had shot a roll of Ilford FP4+ in the Pentax MX that normally takes black and white film (it’s a silver and black MX; the all-black one usually has colour film… well, it makes sense to me!). That was a bit of a murky day, and I had taken mostly detail shots in the neighbourhood. So I loaded the P30 into the same camera, and went round many of the same locations, attempting to take similar shots. It was a bit brighter light, but nothing the metering wouldn’t handle normally. For both films I used a 50mm lens with an orange filter.
There isn’t a huge amount of information about development times, particularly with Ilfosol 3, which I use, so I decided to send both films off to my favourite developer for process and scan. A couple of days later I got a phone call; they couldn’t find the information to put in their machines! We had a bit of a chat, and eventually he said he was willing to hand develop the roll in a Paterson tank, although he didn’t want to be identified as someone who handled P30, as it was much too expensive an approach. He told me he was planning to use XTOL 1+1 for 12 minutes at 20C, with a water stop bath (I think he said that tamed the highlights a bit compared with an acid stop). I don’t remember what agitation routine he was proposing.
I was quite excited when the scans were available for download… and quite surprised when I looked at them! I wrote about this a bit here and in posts after this one . There were some nice outcomes, but very few of the comparison shots (FP4 versus P30) came out anything like the same. I don’t think this was a disastrous processing error; certainly the frame numbers came out. (FP4 first.)
There was a little bit of discussion, and one possibility was that the P30 might be orthochromatic rather than panchromatic as Film Ferrania claimed (this idea went back to a review on emulsive.org at http://emulsive.org/reviews/film-re...rrania-p30alpha-guest-post-by-philip-harrison, which suggested that it "leans towards the orthochromatic: dark red objects like London telephone boxes and buses go dark" (thanks to @StephenM). This might have meant my orange filter had a much different effect on the exposure of the P30, compared to the FP4.
There were a couple of shots that came out similar:
And I thought this P30 shot came out looking pretty good (although much darker than being there):
So, on to the next roll...
A few years ago, I supported the Film Ferrania Kickstarter for their proposed new transparency film. They have had more than their share of troubles but seem to keep plugging away, and I’m still hopeful of getting my film. Along the way, they produced a black and white film, more or less as a production test I think, and named it P30. It’s apparently based on an old Ferrania black and white cinema emulsion, minimally updated for today’s chemicals. They decided to offer their Kickstarter supporters the chance either to swap their transparency film rewards for the P30 (in the preliminary version they call P30 ALPHA), or to buy up to 5 rolls in addition. I decided to do the latter, hoping to give them a bit more cash flow to (slightly!) increase their chances of delivering the transparency film. My 5 rolls arrived a couple of weeks ago.
A few days before, I had shot a roll of Ilford FP4+ in the Pentax MX that normally takes black and white film (it’s a silver and black MX; the all-black one usually has colour film… well, it makes sense to me!). That was a bit of a murky day, and I had taken mostly detail shots in the neighbourhood. So I loaded the P30 into the same camera, and went round many of the same locations, attempting to take similar shots. It was a bit brighter light, but nothing the metering wouldn’t handle normally. For both films I used a 50mm lens with an orange filter.
There isn’t a huge amount of information about development times, particularly with Ilfosol 3, which I use, so I decided to send both films off to my favourite developer for process and scan. A couple of days later I got a phone call; they couldn’t find the information to put in their machines! We had a bit of a chat, and eventually he said he was willing to hand develop the roll in a Paterson tank, although he didn’t want to be identified as someone who handled P30, as it was much too expensive an approach. He told me he was planning to use XTOL 1+1 for 12 minutes at 20C, with a water stop bath (I think he said that tamed the highlights a bit compared with an acid stop). I don’t remember what agitation routine he was proposing.
I was quite excited when the scans were available for download… and quite surprised when I looked at them! I wrote about this a bit here and in posts after this one . There were some nice outcomes, but very few of the comparison shots (FP4 versus P30) came out anything like the same. I don’t think this was a disastrous processing error; certainly the frame numbers came out. (FP4 first.)
There was a little bit of discussion, and one possibility was that the P30 might be orthochromatic rather than panchromatic as Film Ferrania claimed (this idea went back to a review on emulsive.org at http://emulsive.org/reviews/film-re...rrania-p30alpha-guest-post-by-philip-harrison, which suggested that it "leans towards the orthochromatic: dark red objects like London telephone boxes and buses go dark" (thanks to @StephenM). This might have meant my orange filter had a much different effect on the exposure of the P30, compared to the FP4.
There were a couple of shots that came out similar:
And I thought this P30 shot came out looking pretty good (although much darker than being there):
So, on to the next roll...