Back again after a little break - life has been WAAAAY too busy of late! In a good way though so I have no complaints, except that my blog has had to take the back seat for which I apologise! I have been managing to get a few shoots in though and I’ve been trying out a bunch of new (to me) film stocks - prompted in no small part because of financial considerations, but also because, well… there are still loads of film stocks out there to shoot so why not take them for a spin?! Today we’ll be looking at Fomapan 400 in medium format.
I am no stranger to Fomapan film having shot quite a lot of 200 HERE and I figured it was high time that I took their faster speed 400 film for a spin and it did not dissapoint! After a bit of research online I decided to rate the film at 200 and I love the results!!
I really enjoyed shooting with KC on this one as we had a walk around Bradford City Centre making the most of the urban landscape. Fomapan 400 in medium format gives lovely clean and crisp results - I’d be interested to se how it performs in 35mm, i suspect a bit more gritty / grainy which would be no bad thing!
I really like the tonality and texture of this film, shot in good light and over exposed two stops is certainly a good starting point, I think I’d like to experiment with shooting at box speed too as I feel it might add some more charachter / contrast.
I love shooting with the Pentax 67 - it’s a wonderful camera, so easy to shoot with and with the 105mm Takumar lens mounted it’s pretty much perfect! Dreamy and creamy bokeh and razor sharp where you want it, this lens gets a lot of HYPE but I think it’s well deserved, my only gripe with the P67 is that some idiot (me) dropped it a couple of years back and it needed to be repaired but ever since it’s not been the same and I’ll often lose a frame or two from a roll as they overlap, not good when you only have ten shots per roll to start with! And it is almost always some of the better shots which end up being ruined - as in this case :(
I’ll have to send it off for another repair I think, but at least we got some more good shots! Really enjoyed this shoot and it felt good to try out a new and relatively cheap film, prices are going up and up so Fomapan is really viable option for me
In this final shot we snuck into the National Film Museum and I grabbed this reflection shot of KC - I was surprised at how well it came out since I think I metered the scene as 400 and then held my nerve with the Pentax 67 at about 1/30 of a second at f2.4 - lots of punchy contrast in this due to under exposure, I like!
