Film advice?

Hello to all the film enthusiasts

With my recent acquisition of an MX to play with, I'm thinking about film for it. My uses will be primarily casual portraiture, landscape & urban, maybe some street shooting. The portraiture would be mostly indoors.

I have looked into B&W & colour films, and have already ordered some Ilford HP5 400. It's not a C41 process film but from what I've seen, the C41 B&W films have lower contrast & can end up with a colour cast when developed. Is this correct? I know the HP5 is more expensive to have developed, but if that's what will give best results then I don't mind (though my wife might!).

For colour film, I like the look of slide film (Velvia & Provia) but I don't want slides, so I will leave them alone. Looking online, the best results will probably come from Kodak Portra or Ektar 100. I'm concerned that ISO 100 or 160 will not be fast enough for lower light, but at the same time, I don't want to have to use tiny apertures if I use ISO 400 film & want to shoot outdoors. The MX is limited to 1/1000s shutter speed and I simply don't know what speeds to expect when I start to use it.

Any and all advice for a film novice is much appreciated.

The classic film for the photography you describe is Kodak Tri-X link
It has a bit more 'bite' than HP5 I think.

There is only a two stop difference between 100 ISO AND 400, SO F2.8 AT 100 IS F5.6 at 400, hardly a tiny aperture really.

At 400ISO on a dull day you can expect 1/60 @ f5.6

It could take a lifetime of photography to learn all the ramifications of different film/developer/paper combinations....but where to start?

Perhaps a good book on black and white photography would be helpful. Try the following for ideas of where to begin:

The Film Book by Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz, David & Charles, ISBN 0 7153 0150 0

The Photographer's Guide to Black and White by John Freeman, Collins and Brown, ISBN 1 84340 383 8

To get the best out of black and white you really need your own darkroom. Most of the interpretation of your images will come from how you print them - lab produced "literal" prints could be quite bland.

I don't suggest you mix colour into this as yet. It's not possible IMHO to think in both colour and black and white at the same time, so really stick with none until you need to explore the other.

My favouritr mix was: Kodak Tri-X, developed in FX-39, printed on Kodak or Agfa paper. A sample shot, Pentax MX, SMC Pentax 24mm f2.8 lens.
[IMG]http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff250/johnriley1uk/StAnnesonSea.jpg[/IMG]

You might want a spare film body so you can run two rolls of film at once (say a roll of colour Ektar 100 in one and a roll of Tri-X 400 in the other). Something like a P30t would be reliable, very cheap (change from a tenner) and - best of all - doesn't have foam light seals to replace

Will you be getting the films scanned to make your own prints / upload to flickr etc? If so it doesn't matter so much whether you use slide or neg colour film. You would also be able to remove colour casts, tweak contrast, dodge and burn etc.

My favourite combination is Tri-X developed in Kodak D76 printed on Ilford Grade 3 paper. MX with 28mm SMC Pentax Shift lens




And no hairs on the clouds either!

Ken - that is stunning!

Thanks! I must confess I didn't print it myself, full credit goes to my chum Robert Burns who is one of the finest B+W printers around. It was for a book 'Six Scottish Burghs' for the BBC.

You can enjoy more of Robert's inspirational printing here link

I'd try a C41 process film first for ease of use, until you get the hang of it. You can bung the film in at any high street, and you'll get the negatives back with a cheap set of prints. OK, they'll have a colour cast, but will give you an idea of your output. You can then scan the negs and easily convert to true B&W for further work on them.

I have found high street film scanners (Snappy Snaps) pretty poor (low resolution, high compression), and the cheap film scanners also seem less than satisfactory.

I came across this company and have been very happy with the results and cost. They will process & scan C41, B&W, slides, 120, 6x4 etc.

http://www.snapsphotoservices.com/

I think dev & scan for a 36 exposure film is about £10 inc P&P. (Size is 3130 x 2075 pixels).

For B+W you really should go to a specialist processor otherwise you will be very disappointed. 'Black & White Photography' magazine will point you in the right direction.

As regards the chromogenic BW films...

These films have a wide exposure latitude so it is very difficult to "get it wrong" (whatever wrong is...). If you over expose you get lower contrast but finer grain, whereas if you underexpose you get higher contrast but coarser grain. With Kodak BW400CN I set the light meter to ISO 320 which seems to give me good prints. It isn't really true that they give "low contrast", I'm often pulling back the contrast on the scans I get done.

Scans from happy snaps etc (and the prints) can have a nasty colour hue as they print the images on colour paper and do not filter out the orange base layer of the negative. Good quality labs such as "The Darkroom UK" will give prints and scans without the nasty colour cast but are quite expensive. I haven't tried Pentaxophile's link but they seem cheaper.

Part of the fun of analogue photography is trying different films (and if you have a darkroom developers/papers etc.) and deciding what works for you. I, for example, really don't like HP5 much, I find it comes out rather flat looking. I do like the CHS ART films which are traditional BW films, slow (as low as ISO 25) but have a nice "glow" to them. Hard to describe really.

If you look at my flickr photostream you'll find lots of film images, usually tagged with the film used.

Best wishes, Kris.

Is that really so? I wouldn't have thought there was much 'art' to processing B&W films, if you just want a straight process. The magic then happens in the digital darkroom (or actual darkroom, if you're that way inclined). I have processed and developed B&W before, and I struggle to see how any fully automated processor could be worse than me, with my measuring jugs and stopwatch, manually turning the tank every xx seconds!

I use chromagenic B/W films and have them processed at my local ASDA for £2, with an extra 97p for scanning to CD. The Hi Res images are 1800 x 1200 2.1 mp equivalent.
I never ask for prints (too expensive if the pics are carp) but will occasionally get some done later if I'm satisfied after viewing on my computer screen. I may even scan the negs myself if I really like a pic.
Cheap and cheerful way of doing it but can be tremendously rewarding.
Sometimes I'll convert my colour images to B/W...but that's obviously another ball game.

Oh my goodness, I can feel the photographers turning in their graves!

It's not so much the process, although more of that in a minute, but the relationship between the film choice and developer choice. I mentioned Tri-X plus FX-39. The result of that mix is sharp, crisp grain and moderately high contrast. Then there are softer developers that reduce grain but maybe make the grain "mushier". Then there are two step developers, high contrast developers, speed increasing developers.....

As for the process, do you use high dilutions and long processing times, or concentrated solutions and short, sharp processing...and so on, ad infinitum.

I would not trust my black and white processing to a lab by choice. It took years to get just the sort of negatives I liked to print and my option was just one option in a whole gamut of possible options.

I was just about to write something very similar to John but he beat me to it.

I've always suspected that automated labs who dont have a high volume throughput (is that a word?) will be using stale chemicals anyway. Everything I've ever seen done for others seems to produce terribly thin negatives ie. lacking in contrast and pitifully poor shadow and highlight detail.

@ Womble: Hi Kris, you always come up with something trustworthy that I didn't know! In this case chromogenic B+W films.

Back to John's point about developing time/concentration; I've always been a believer in reading the instructions and Kodak are exceptional in the clarity of their's. For me, and the record, it is D76 diluted 1:1 for 10.5 minutes with agitation every minute. Then again there's always a lot of concentration and agitation in photography...