Following my London shoot where I was using FOMA 100 classic, a very sharp and finely grained emulsion, I wanted to experiment with using something different to the regular film stocks I had been using like HP5+, Fuji C200 and Kodak Ultramax 400.
I did some research and eventually came upon another release from Czech film manufacturer, FOMA. This release is a 320 speed, soft emulsion film, giving contour sharpness over finer, point sharpness. This was something that appealed to me, as using vintage cameras for my work, I wanted to use a film that might hark to the retro nature of the cameras and produce images that could reflect the age of the cameras.
The film is fairly unforgiving in terms of exposure latitude meaning metering must be used to determine a correct exposure, the actual celluloid itself is very thick, almost twice as thick as other medium format films I have used thus far, this became difficult to work with when loading into the dev tanks. FOMA recommend that a unique developer, sold by them, is used to develop Retropan 320, however this wouldn’t have been a viable option for myself and so I decided to use the XTOL stocks that are available at the University labs. This yielded results, as seen above. The negatives came out with a slight off purplish tone but one that was not within reasonable levels for a black and white film and did not show up when scanned in.
As for the tonal qualities of the film, it delivers wonderfully soft and rich grayscale tones that create lush, and definitely ‘retro’ style images. Unfortunately my camera has scratched the film on its way through the camera, creating some heavy lines through the images, however I will use this to my advantage and allow the film to become more weathered to enhance the vintage nature of the shots that I’m going for in using this film emulsion.
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