Guide to film types

PoleStar

As a budding film photgrapher, just starting out now on 35mm (an old manual nikkormat with nifty 50!), I am kinda confused about the array of different films out there.

I have searched the net but have yet to find a good summary guide of the different films available.

Does anyone know of such a guide which explains the characteristics and differences between the different choices, which film for what, which is good/bad etc, both for 35 and 120 film?

(120 film also as I just ordered a 500cm from KEH: )

dazftw

Here's some reading material it goes though some film and medium format stuff.

http://forums.skateperception.com/index.php?showtopic=117762

magicbastarder

i rarely shoot C41, and this is a personal opinion rather than a comprehensive guide.
on E6 i shoot mainly velvia (for landscapes) or provia 400, depending on what sort of light i'm expecting.
for b&w - delta 3200 i find great for portraits; it's very forgiving on skin tones, forgiving with slight errors of focus, and the grain is lovely. at the other end of the spectrum, i shoot a bit of pan f 50, mainly because gunns had a clearout of out of date stock of it a couple of years ago and i still have a few rolls in the fridge. it's much finer, obviously. for general purpose, HP5 is fine.

i tend not to shoot neopan, as i get my stuff developed in gunns, and they use rodinal which gives contrasty results with neopan.

ender ender

Trial and error is useful, if you have the money to try out loads of different film types. Granted it'll take you ages but it can be fun too, and you might have a different opinion on a particular film to everyone else. I'd heard only good things about Fuji Reala, used it and hated it, now it's the only colour neg film I use. It can depend on where you get your stuff processed as well.

What kind of stuff do you want to do? Maybe if you intend on shooting a specific thing some kind Boards members could give you suggestions of film types (just don't ask me, I only use about 3 different films!)

Alternatively, what dazftw said (just spotted his post...)

thefizz

If you are starting out with B&W film, just decide on what film speed you need and get whatever film is readily available to you. Don't worry too much about different films as you need to work with just one for a while and get to know it before comparing it to a new film. Choice of developer and method of developing will further alter a films characteristics.

Heebie

The biggest differences in film are going to be...

For black & white:

Grain Structure
Contrastiness

For color:

Grain Structure
Contrastiness
Color Saturation
Color vividness

What do these mean? A lot of different things.

The grain structure is really complicated.. and has to do with the chemicals in the emulsion.. what shape are they? How closely packed together are they? How sensitive to light are they? (and for color films, what percentages of them are red/green/blue [cyan/magenta]yellow)

T-Max from Kodak, for example has very densely packed T-shaped grain, and it's a "maximum" contrast film, so the base of it is almost entirely clear, and the gradations between fully black and entirely clear are fairly large.

Tri-X (and Plus-X), also from Kodak, is a fairly low contrast film (the base is nowhere near clear, and tends to remain somewhat purple in color even after most commercial developing.. most home developers keep it in the fixer longer to eliminate this since it indicates that not all the silver has been taken out and eventually leads to oxidation of the emulsion over time.)
it also has an extremely fine grain.. the particles are very small, and fairly evenly distributed, so it tends to give excellent renditions of things that are full of lots of different shades. With some tweaking of the chemicals and the developer time you can force it to be pretty contrasty though
Kodak also makes T400CN, which is a C-41 color process black & white film designed to give a neutral or cooltone [greyscale] image on analog color printing equipment & paper.

Ilford films tend to have a similar size grain to the Tri-X/Plus-X, but the distribution of the particles is a lot more random.. almost like a stochastic dither. I tend to prefer it over similar Kodak in all situations.. but that's me.
They make XP2 a black & white film that is developed in standard c-41 color process chemical process, which is designed to give a sepia-tone to the images on fully-analog printing equipment. (modern digital printing equipment in minilabs gives the operator the choice of whether to do cooltone [greyscale] or sepiatone etc.. at processing time.) I think Kodak licensed the process to use in their C-41 black & white film.
Ilford XP2 is only avaialble in 400ISO.


Color films tend to have similar aims, and different companies will tend to put very different emphasis on color shading.

Examples:

Fuji films tend to run towards green and blue. (these lead to healthy looking skin tones in Asians.. and Fuji is a Japanese company. It makes sense for them to make a film that makes people look like they have healthy skin.) This makes Fuji film fantastic for shooting greenery, and going for a "cooler" look. Fuji's Reala line is kind of like an imitation of Kodak's color tints mentioned below.
Fuji's regular slide film is excellent, but they also make Velvia, which is considered the film with "the highest resolving power of any slide film".. Velvia 50 is about the sharpest film you'll ever get. (I've seen estimates before of Velvia being along the lines of equivalent to 125 megapixels at a 35mm size.. it's just nuts how fine-grained this film is.. it's staggering!) It cross-processes well in C-41 color chemistry too.
Some would argue that Kodachrome (which is no longer manufactured, and can no longer be developed since the last working K-14 process machine was shut down in September) was better.. but I'd have to disagree with them. Kodachrome was nice.. but I like Velvia better. Fuji also makes Astia and Fujichrome slide films. Astia isn't as awesome as Velvia, but it's still excellent..and I think a bit cheaper. Fujichrome is "run of the mill" slide film.

Kodak films tend towards yellow and red.. which are colors that give white people a healthy glow to their skin. Their Portra line is especially geared towards faithfully reproducing caucasian skin tones. I've known people who shoot flowers and things like that with Portra.. but they just look like crap on it..and it's a very low-contrast film.. in line with doing portraiture.. you want to minimise the appearance of pores and other defects in the skin, and contrasty films will exaggerate them and make them more prominent.
Kodaks' slide films (Elite Chrome) are fairly run-of-the-mill. Kodachrome was their "fancy" slide film, and it pretty much is no more.


Agfa films (a German company) are about as "flat" as they get.. their color reproduction is meant to be as precisely matched to what's really in front of the camera as possible.
Agfa Scala is the only black & white slide film I know of.. and can only be processed in a fairly small number of labs.

Konica and 3M both make very average C-41color print films, and probably some others as well. If you've ever bought "store brand" film, or a no-name or store-branded "disposable" film camera.. it was probably loaded with either Konica or 3M brand film. They both tend to have almost random color casts that vary by the lot of film. (not serious ones.. just leanings slightly one way or the other.)

Hopefully that's not TOO much information. (I used to sell all of the films listed above..and got to listen to all the salesmen's schpiels when they were trying to get us to buy more of THEIR film over their competitors.. and we liked to independently verify the claims.. and were usually shocked when we found they were true... because it was most of the time. Having good a good spectrophotometer and a good densitometer were very useful)

thefizz

Heebie wrote: »

Agfa Scala is the only black & white slide film I know of.. and can only be processed in a fairly small number of labs.

If anyone is interested in B&W transparencies, check out dr5 in the US. They can process almost every current B&W film into transparencies. There are lots of examples on their web site. I have used them for 120 films and their service is excellent.

http://www.dr5.com/blackandwhiteslide/filmreview.html

Nisio

I'll add this to the film bit of the FAQ, good informaiton

PoleStar

Wow, some very useful info there and some good links, thanks!

BTW, can anyone recommend a good website to order film, with a good array, good price and maybe bulk buying eg 5 rolls for price of 4 etc?

dazftw

ebay
7dayshop
Freestyle Photographic(if you want to buy a lot with more than 1 person. Shipping is expensive.)
call up gunn's in dublin if you want something within 1 day.