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Showing posts with the label black and white film

What's the cheapest B&W 120 film available?

Not sure why I'm even looking, I've got plenty. Maybe so I can advise students at my school? In any case, I found myself looking to see what was the cheapest B&W 120 film I could find. In general, I think there's no such thing as a bad film.There are films that are easier to use and process, there are films with various traits that may not be suited for intended use. But I'm no longer interested in the sharpest finest grain films. I used to shoot Tech Pan and Agfapan 25 in the 1980's. Now I look at the prints and negs and, some are pretty nice. But on the whole they are too contrasty. I switched to ORWO NP20 (and later NP22 in the USA) and much prefer those negs. After ORWO stopped making consumer films, I moved on to Acros. Fuji Acros was a beautiful film, with wonderful tones as well as fine grain and minimal reciprocity failure issues. So today I'm going to do some searching and put the results up here. Please note, I'm in the US, so it's US suppl

Long Daylight Exposure Chart: Kentmere 100

Ultrafine/Kentmere 100 Reciprocity Test-Camera: Fuji G617, Film Ultrafine (E)Xtreme 100, ND-9+red @ f22 140 seconds If you are interested in long daylight exposures, you may have run in to the same problem I have. Say you have your camera all set up, the clouds are whisping by, and you want to get that long daylight blur thing going. You figure a 30 second exposure (approx.) would be ideal. Well how do I get there? I've got a bunch of filters: a 4 stop ND, a 9 stop ND, as well as a red, yellow, and orange filter. It's mid day and my meter reading says 1/125th @ f16. I start counting with my fingers: -1 stop = 1/60th, -2 stop = 1/30th, and so on. So then I get down to 4 seconds with my darkest ND filter. If I stack both my ND filters, I get down to 30 seconds where I wanted to be. But wait! That's without reciprocity corrections. Great if I had Acros for film. But I don't and it's being retired soon, so I wont have access to it at all. What I ended up makin