philly

I finished and developed another roll of film last week with my Yashica Electro 35 GSN rangefinder. It was a roll of Ilford HP5+ 400, a black and white negative film. The shot above is my favorite from the roll of 36.

I saw her walking east on the 1500 block of Chestnut St with the wigged mannequin head in her left hand. I know that there's either a beauty school or hairdressing school on that block from walking by there so much and seeing the students milling around outside the building. I quickly caught up to her and walked passed her with my camera pointed backwards and up from my hip. The lens is a 45mm f/1.7 so it was a tight frame, but I got the scene in frame. I dialed in the focus of 1m and an aperture of f/4 for a little margin of error and it looks like I got it right. All the shooting from the hip I've been doing with with my digital cameras has paid off enough for me to get a feel for it now with film. If it were sunnier than it was, I could've gone with a smaller f-stop allowing for some more depth of field and a larger margin of error, but I can't control the sun, just the settings on my camera.

The rest of the photos from the roll are up in this flickr set. The crowd favorite seems to be this shot taken down Chancellor St from 12th St just outside 12th St Gym. The strong lines must be getting people to click on the thumbnail for the larger photo.

The HP5+ has been my favorite film so far and will be my first re-purchase of a film stock. The negatives are very dense – nice and dark with a good range of greys in between. I've read that I can manually dial in anywhere between 100 and 800 ASA with this film (rated at 400 ASA) on the same roll and get nice negatives without pushing or pulling the processing accordingly. Now that's some great latitude to work with making this single roll a very versatile one – very good for changing lighting conditions. I'll surely be keeping that in mind the next time I have this film in a camera to test out for myself.

I'm currently carrying around the Nikon F3 slr with some 1 year expired Ilford XP2 Super, another black and white film stock, but this is one of the new breeds of black and white which can be developed at any 1 hour photo lab due to it's C41 processing meaning it's not a true black and white film. The negatives will have an orange color cast to them and I've read that if I were to try to make real black and white prints from them in a darkroom, it would be more difficult than with true black and white film (like the HP5+). I'll be taking the film to the lab.

Oh, and film processed, printed and scanned by the good people over at Photo Lounge (19/Chestnut).

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