Like many film photography enthusiasts, I’m always pleased to try something new (or new-ish at least) so, when idly browsing film websites earlier this year, I noticed some discussion about Adox HR-50 35mm black and white film and decided to give it a go.
To be honest, it isn’t that new: Adox announced it in 2018 and I suppose it’s been around since shortly afterwards, but HR-50 piqued my interest because it was billed as a high resolution film – a bit like the old Kodak Tech Pan – but with a usable ISO 50. Tech Pan of old needed to be shot at ISO 25 or lower to get decent pictorial results and was, consequently, something of a faff.
Another thing I noticed was a claim that HR-50 responds well to contrast control filters. These used to be commonplace in B&W film photography but seem to be much less widely used now. Essentially, B&W films – notwithstanding the supposedly panchromatic characteristics of modern B&W film – render grey tones differently depending on what coloured filter you but in front of them. This has interesting and useful effects: for example, a red filter will render blue skies as almost black – giving dramatic contrast between sky and clouds – whilst a blue filter will highlight freckles and skin blemishes. In between these two extremes, orange yellow and green filters all have their own more subtle effects. I use a light yellow-green X0 (that’s X-zero) filter on my lens for about 80% of my photography because it slightly improves contrast in skies, and it gives richer skin-tones in portraits.
Anyway, mildly enthused by this, I bought a roll – and a bottle of the dedicated Adox HR-Dev – and decided to take it with me on a short trip my wife and I made to Istanbul earlier this year. It’s a beautiful and outrageously photogenic city – which I had never previously visited – so a good place to put HR-50 through its paces.
So here we go: a small representative selection of pictures, all taken on HR-50 in my trusty old Nikon F4, with a 28-105 Nikkor zoom lens and a Hoya X0 filter (get the right size for your lens! These filters seem to come and go intermittently on Amazon so check back). The film was developed in Adox HR-Dev at 1+49 for 11 mins at 22ºC; fixed in Ilford Rapid fixer; and washed in filtered water for 12 mins. The negatives were scanned into Lightroom using my Nikon Coolscan V but are otherwise completely unmessed-with (eg, I’ve left dust spots, drying marks etc etc as they came out of the scanner and haven’t adjusted contrast, shadow detail etc).
The pictures
My Thoughts
I’m pleased with the results I got and it’s definitely a film I will be using again. It’s fine-grained and contrasty with strong blacks but a few experimental tweaks in Lightroom suggest that it retains excellent shadow detail. From my brief experience, it does indeed seem to respond well to contrast correction – at least with an X0 filter – and I liked its rendition of skin and skies. I’ll certainly try out some different contrast filters on my next roll.
From a practical handling point of view, HR-50 is coated onto a strong polyester base which can be mildly troublesome when removing it from its spool in the darkroom, and despite having been hung up to dry overnight exhibited an annoying tendency to want to curl up but this is a very minor quibble.
Buying
A quick Google suggests that HR-50 is reasonably readily available in the UK for around the £6 mark for a 36 exposure roll, which is decent value for any B&W film these days. The B&H website in the US shows it as ‘no longer available’ but it is still listed on the www.adox.de website so fingers crossed: it certainly deserves to stay in production.
Adrian Weale 