Another day, another film review.
I spent last weekend developing and scanning a backlog of 35mm black and white films that has built up over the last year or so. Most of it was Kodak Tri-X, and Ilford FP4 and HP5 which are my ‘normal’ B&W film choices but there were a couple of experimental choices as well. These latter included a roll of Fomapan 400, bought at a discount as a job lot of five, which I thought I’d try out.
Foma is a Czech company that has been operating under that name since the 1920s (my 5 rolls of Fomapan 400 were packaged in retro ‘100th anniversary’ boxes), and they have a good reputation amongst contemporary film users. I’ve previously tried out their 100 ISO offering, though not this one, but as the price of a roll of Kodak Tri-X (my all time favourite film stock) edges towards twenty quid, I’m in the market for an alternative.
So, here we go. I took this on the same trip to beautiful Istanbul as the Adox HR-50 in my previous film review, so it was shot in my Nikon F4, using both a 28-105 zoom and a 200mm F4 telephoto (both fitted with X0 yellow-green filters; developed in Ilford ID-11 at 1+3 dilution at 20º for 23 minutes; fixed in Ilford Rapid fixer; and washed in filtered water for 10 mins 30 secs. I scanned it with my Nikon Coolscan V at 4000dpi and imported the pictures into Adobe Lightroom where I resized the images but otherwise left them un-fucked with.
The Pictures
My thoughts
I’m happy with Fomapan 400. It’s nice and contrasty, but with good tonal range, and the grain is reasonably unobtrusive. After being hung up to dry overnight, it shows no tendency to curl which makes it easy to scan and I don’t foresee any difficulty making silver prints from it. I can certainly see myself using it again with no qualms.
But having said that, a quick check on Amazon.co.uk shows that it’s retailing at around the £8-9 pounds per roll mark. A key feature of Central and Eastern European produced films a couple of years back was that they were refreshingly cheap: clearly this is no longer the case. Right now on Amazon, this is pretty much as expensive than Ilford HP5+ – a film I’ve been regularly using for years – and I can’t see this displacing it, unless the price difference changes significantly.
Adrian Weale 