Into The Foto: Film at 11

House of Vintage (Ricoh 500, Ilford PAN-F)

In my previous post I couldn’t find a lab in town that would pull process C-41 film and ended up sending 4 rolls of XP-2 and 2 rolls of PanF 50 to Ilford Labs in California.

Last Thursday I got them back and I am very, very impressed with the results: no water marks, no scratches, no dust. Even the medium quality scans they provided on CD are of remarkably good quality with minimal dust. The images in this post are from those scans. In short, worth the 16 bucks a roll and the wait. I don't think I could even do silver as well as these guys back when I did process silver.

A few things jumped out at me:

I used the Sunny 16 rule to guide my metering with the Ricoh and it worked very well, even with the Ricoh’s non-standard shutter speed scale.
I’m going to have to retire my dear old friend, the OM-2. It’s been with me for decades, but it looks like the electronic shutter is losing its mind. You know, lots of blank exposures even though everything sounded like all was well: mirror up, mirror down, sundry mechanical noises. It's not about the batteries; if it was, the OM4 would have acted the same way. It’s not worth the dosh to get this old campaigner fixed, it goes back into my camera cabinet to slumber: the battery munching OM-4 and the not so voracious OM-4T will have to take its place.
XP2 works very nicely when pulled 1 stop. Put a yellow filter on it and it prods buttock.
PAN F 50 is a freaking awesome film.

Below are a few examples using the Ilford provided scans. This coming week I’m firing up my scanners (V750 and Coolscan V ED to compare the two) and do some hi-res work. Stay tuned.

The negative looks better than the scan. I think it'll respond nicely as a 16 bit tiff but it does capture the searing sun of the prairie around these parts. Back in the day I'd print this on a hard paper.