take it slow and fine
Ilford Pan F 50 by Harman Technology, Ltd.
By Brian Grossman
26 February 2008
When I got back into photography a couple of years ago I decided that the world had gone digital so I bought myself the brand-new, just-introduced Nikon D50 and vowed to learn all I could about the new world of digital imaging. Gradually the excitement and novelty of my new toy wore off and I became increasingly frustrated by one of its greatest limitations, the inability to produce consistently good b&w images.
I tried to learn all I could about digital b&w conversion. I desaturated. I played with the channel mixer and the image mode. I adjusted curves and exposure, punched up highlights, brightness, contrast. Nothing I tried produced a consistently snappy b&w image. Not only that, but I began to notice the work of other photographers, and I found there were very few truly great b&w images from digital image sensors. They're all flat and grey or they've been overly photoshopped and it shows. There was one guy on deviantart who really did a phenomenal job of it so I sent him a note and asked him how he did it and he refused to divulge his method, claiming it was the secret that defined his work.
Motivated by the maxim that color photography is about color and b&w is about everything else, I began shooting b&w film again. It was around this time that I began to notice the optical limitations of zoom lenses, particularly those of twenty to thirty years ago which I was buying on ebay for my manual-focus cameras, and began to purchase and use prime lenses instead. I thrilled to learn that some of the highest resolution lenses ever made are actually quite affordable, like the old Hexanons and first-generation AF Nikkors.
I began to wonder, just how good can a 35mm image be? What is the best this format is capable of? For this quest I'd need the sharpest, finest-grain film available. I searched Kodak's website in horror to find that Panatomic-X had been discontinued. Heresy! Infidels! I had read in the Wall Street Journal last year that Kodak was considering getting out of the film business altogether for profitability reasons, but I had no idea they had killed an icon already. What next, Kodachrome?
It was then that I ran acorss an old article in the February 1975 issue of Modern Photography comparing Kodak and Ilford films. "Images made from Ilford Pan F negatives did appear snappier than those from Panatomic-X. . . . Ilford has won the game here." This has since become my film of choice for daylight work.
But what about the new flat-crystal emulsions, you say? Aren't Kodak's T-grains superior to the old "golf-ball" shaped grains of yesteryear? Isn't this probably why Kodak discontinued Pan-X in favor of T-Max 100? I found the answer on Ilford's website. You see, Ilford still makes both Pan F and Delta 100, their flat-crystal equivalent of T-Max. And they are kind enough to explain that the advantage of the traditional emulsion is, in a word, latitude. In the typical style of British understatement, Ilford says its Delta films "require a bit more care in exposure and processing."
In my opinion one of the great advantages of b&w film over either digital or color reversal film is expousre latitude. The aforementioned Modern article gives Pan F a latitude range of six and one third stops. This is a tremendous advantage when shooting antique cameras with outdated metering technology or eyeballing it with a meterless rangefinder. It also means I can capture a broader range of shadow and highlight detail than I can with my D50 which has a nasty habit of clipping highlights. And it's not necessary to obsess over meticulously brewing my developer within one degree of the recommended temperature. In short, this sort of latitude gives me more room for error and a superior final product when I'm spot on.
I've enjoyed Pan F so much that now I'm anxious to try Efke KB25 and Rollei Pan25. Anyone know of a published comparison test between these three?
Fine grain film is a wonderful way to exploit the digital image quality of my Nikon scanner. I picked up a Coolscan for about five hundred bucks which produces a twenty megapixel TIFF file from a 35mm negative. A twenty megapixel image can be enlarged to about 12 x 19 inches, or 31 x 48 centimeters, while maintaining 300 dpi print quality. Canon's full-frame EOS 1Ds Mark III has a full-frame twenty megapixel sensor, and it lists for eight grand. Nikon doesn't even make a twenty megapixel sensor. Hasselblad's twenty-two megapixel H3DII-22 is a bargain at twenty-five grand retail.
The bottom line: for a thousand dollars you can get yourself a good film scanner, an old-fashioned 35 and a couple of good hi-res prime lenses and produce better b&w images than the lastest professional digital equipment. If you use the right film.
The images attached to this essay were all taken with prime lenses on Ilford Pan F 50 and scanned with a Nikon Coolscan. I included a cropped version of each image cut down as far as I could while observing this magazine's 2200 pixel minimum requirement.
For b&w there is simply no substitute for old fashioned fine grain film.
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