Kodak HC-110 and Ilford FP4+

A while ago, I found a few 35mm bulk loaders of my Dad's in the darkroom. One of them had a bunch of PanF+ in it (which has all been used up now, unfortunately), and one of them had a bunch of Ilford FP4+ in it. I still haven't gotten to the end of the FP4+.

I figured since I'm running all these tests, I might as well throw FP4+ into the mix. I decided to start with HC-110 since I'm more familiar with that developer.

FP4+ is a film designed to be fine-grained and well-toned. In my book, it accomplishes both of these goals when developed in HC-110. I shot and developed at its published ISO of 125, and am happy with the results. The tones look great, even on 35mm film. FP4+ isn't generally considered a portrait film, but with the way it looks here, I'll definitely try running some portraits through it as it fits what I have in mind for many of the film portraits I do.

I also have yet to try it out with Rodinal, but it's on my to-do list. I'll eventually try it out in many different developers. I have a bag of Xtol, and there's a bag of D76 calling my name at the camera store. I also know for a fact that there are some old Ilford developers laying around, buried in the darkroom somewhere.

Here are the images:

As you can see, the sharpness is good, and the tones are astoundingly good. This is one of the few frames that had a good exposure from the roll. I was doing some more testing on an iPod app I downloaded that was supposed to be a light meter. It's no good, unfortunately. But this frame came out okay.

The grain is definitely there. It's not Delta 100. But it's fine, and for nature subjects, I feel that this is one of the few times the grain can even add something to the shot. That is, of course, just my opinion.

 After scanning, I had a little bit of rescue to do on this severely overexposed frame. I didn't get fancy, I just dragged the midtones down in Photoshop since that's what seemed to suffer the most in the overexposure. Unfortunately, that accentuated the grain, which is quite visible in the 100% crop. Still, the tones look really great here.

This grain is more than I expect to get if I expose and develop properly in the future.

I think shooting portraits on this stuff at 35mm might be pushing it on the grain for me. I'll probably still give it a shot to see how I like it. But I can definitely see myself using 120 rolls of this stuff for portraits. When I get my hands on some, I'll be sure to try it out.