April 25, 2010

FP4+ by Khoa


Khoa sent me two images and said: „These two photos were taken on two separate recent visits to Montréal. The first is of the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-Du-Monde, taken with an Olympus XA, and the second was taken in a downtown hotel room with a Leica IIIc and Summitar 50mm f/2. Both were shot on Ilford FP4, exposed at its box speed of ISO 125 (though with the Leica, having no internal light meter, I "guestimated" with an old selenium meter somewhere between ISO 100 and 200). Development was in Caffenol-C-M, as in Reinhold's blog, at 12 minutes and 20 degrees centigrade. I find that Ilford FP4 gives me surprisingly much larger grain than Kodak TMAX 100 and Fuji Acros 100 (which I now prefer using and can get finer grain having pushed them even to ISO400), but in certain applications, it gives an unmistakable grainy film look.

The negatives were copied with a Nikon compact camera and the Nikon ES-E28 slide copy adapter, and adjusted in the GIMP.

To be honest, Caffenol C-M is the first and only developer I've used as an adult (my last film developing experience having been in high school as a teenager in the mid-1990s), and, well, I'm convinced, as I find that with a bit of care, I can get better results than the majority of "non-pro" labs.“


Thank you very much Khoa.. More of his images you can see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khoa_sus2
Other photographers confirmed me that the FP4+ is not as fine grained as expected with a Caffenol development.

Best regards - Reinhold

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I develloped yesterday evening my first film with the recipe of this blog with the C-M version. It was a FP4+. I followed the time indicated in this post with a correction of -1 minute because my develloper was at 21°C (I used the Ilford curves).

I have not printed anything yet (and i do not have a film scanner), but I looked at my film this morning it looks fine.

First attend with Caffenol and a success. Thanks to this blog.

I will give more information after develloping other film and print some photo.

imagesfrugales said...

merci beaucoup, Romary.

Unknown said...

Hello again,

You can see the results of my experiments on my blog : http://le-stenope-republicain.blogspot.com/2010/07/caffenol-c-m.html. That is in french, but you can see the photo.

I got very good results. I am very impressed by the results. The photo have been taken with and old very primitive hungarian camera. I just notice that on the 3rd photo which very under-exposed, there some fog. Is it the consequence of the under-exposure?

Unknown said...

A new experiment with FP4+. This time with a 135 film : http://le-stenope-republicain.blogspot.com/2010/09/caffenol-c-m-nouvelle-tentative.html

9 minutes @ 23°C, agitation 10 times initially + 5 time every minutes

The film a bit thin, but as you can see still OK for printing