Funky Film

One of the most fun parts of film photography is getting to try out different films. Traditional films each have their own special look, but with the huge reduction in film production, the film shooter community has gotten creative, using found stashes of expired films and even films not entirely meant to be run through a still camera. I have three of these oddball stocks in my collection now and I’m looking for just the right use for each.

The most normal one is a roll of the Film Photography Project’s Retrochrome 400. This is government surplus 400 speed Kodak Ektachrome color positive (slide) film that expired in 2004. They say it performs perfectly well still so they’re pretty sure it was in some sort of deep freeze for the last 15-some years. I’ll probably save this for my  little project I have coming up in the fall that I’ve not written about yet. Soon. Oh, and those two other rolls of Ektachrome 100? They’re for the project as well. Stuff is becoming hard to come by and I wanted to make sure I had enough.

I’m also sitting on a roll of the Film Photography Project’s X-2, made from Eastman’s Double X black and white motion picture film. This is the film stock used to shoot Raging Bull, but hand-rolled into recycled 35mm film canisters. It’s a 200 ISO film, so it will have a pretty wide latitude. I might try shooting this one inside so I can open up my lens wider than I’m able to outside with 200 speed film. 

The last funky film is, I think, the funkiest. It was also purchased from the Film Photography Project but produced by some folks called Washi. They make a series of films at a variety of ISO’s and this one is called Washi “S” and the “S” is for sound. That’s because it was made to record audio, not images. Apparently, recording on 35mm film was the high fidelity thing back in the day, to the extent that several of Frank Sinatra’s albums bragged about being recording on film. It’s a 50 ISO black and white film, which will be great in my camera outside. The folks at FPP say it’s super high contrast and very low grain. Aside from outside, I’m not sure what I’ll shoot with this one. 

I have my eye on some other non-traditional films, such as a few other motion picture films, a still camera film made for security cameras and one made for high altitude surveillance photography. One of the rewards of getting comfortable developing at home is that I feel confident trying these other stocks, and since the cost of processing is so small, I don’t feel bad spending a few bucks on a film that may or not give me anything worthwhile. 

ISO, Grain, and My Collection of New Film

When I decided to try to get the folding Brownie working, I ordered a 5-pack of Kodak Tri-X 400 B&W film. I figured five rolls would give me a good shot to see if the camera was viable or not and Tri-X is pretty much the standard in the US for black and white film. This is the film stock used by nearly all photojournalists back before the digital age, so it’s “look” is one we are all familiar with from newspapers. I thought that would be the best film to judge how the camera was working because I knew what it should look like. I believe that worked and that I now know that that old camera can, if I get everything right, produce great images. 

Now it’s time to branch out. One of the fun parts of film photography is working with different film stocks that all have different properties, some slightly different and some vastly different. The range of films in black and white isn’t nearly what it is in color, but there are still differences in tone and contrast and grain that can be fun to play around with. 

So, I went to B&H and found four different films that were all among the cheapest on the site. I don’t want to break the bank and seeing as I’m not using anything approaching state of the art, why not embrace that and go as simple as possible? I also wanted to try out different ISOs to see if I could get good exposures using my kind of guesswork light metering system and the Brownie’s limited options. 

The 400 ISO Tri-X I started with is a great all-around film speed that can handle both bright sun and even indoor artificial light. If you’re not familiar, ISO refers to the film’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO (sometimes called the ASA), the more light-sensitive the film is and the less light is needed to get a good exposure. Higher ISO is also called higher speed. The nomenclature is confusing at first, but it means the same thing, higher number equals able to shoot in lower light. 

The trade off is grain, the kind of chunky look that a print or scan of an image has, making it look like it’s made up of a ton of little dots. Grain can be big or small and rough or smooth and it is one of the huge differences in different films. Grain is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of photographers add grain to their digital images in Photoshop or Lightroom. There’s a slider right there just to do that. It makes an image look more.....artistic, maybe? More “real”? Which is kind of ironic as it actually makes the image look less like the thing the camera was actually aimed at in the real world. But we are used to seeing grain in photographs, so to us, or many of us at least, it belongs there. Anyhow, often cheaper films are grainier, and higher speed (higher ISO) films are grainier. 

The films I chose are Arista Edu Ultra 100, Arista Edu Ultra 400, Holga 400, and Foma Creative 200. These each cost about $5 versus the more than $7 for each roll of Tri-X. I thought I had three film brands and four different rolls. Turns out all the film I bought is made by Foma, the Czech company I talked about in the last blog post. It’s just different packaging. I don’t mind, except that I really have three different films as the Holga 400 and Arista Edu 400 are the same thing. But no biggie, I’ll have fun with all of these and look forward to seeing the results.