SQUIBB

Claremont Road, Leytonstone, 16th January 1994

As described in my previous post, ‘Retracings’, after the first set of photographs of the destruction along the route of the M11 Link Road, I returned on subsequent occasions through the first months of 1994 to take more pictures. The next set of photographs was taken on the 16th of January, a Sunday. For these I used a colour film, according to the film rebate, Kodak Gold 100. I didn’t take very many photographs–nine–and three of them almost exactly replicated those shot on black and white film just over two weeks earlier as featured in my last post; I hadn’t, at that point, developed the black and white film. The colour film was developed the following week, before the black and white film, probably at Boots or Jessops in Ilford, dropped off before college one morning and picked up a couple of days later. The black and white film was not developed until the second week of February, partly due to the periodic absence of the photography technician, from which one had to borrow developing tanks, as well as lenses to use the enlargers, signed out and signed back in from a cubby hole.

I did take more photographs on the short southern end of Claremont Road, where more houses had been demolished in the intervening weeks, with a sequence of four images from the end of the terrace facing the Central line, around to the section of the road where it rejoined Grove Green Road: this begins with the image below with the NO M11 graffiti, and ends with the image at the top of this post. These obliquely show some of the murals painted on the corrugated iron hoardings, and the painting on the houses, which became more prominent in the summer of 1994 along Claremont Road, functioning somewhat like an open air art gallery.

In January 2014, I retraced the route again, and photographed some of the same sites on colour film (the film rebate tells me that this was a Boots 200 ISO film, almost certainly out of date by the time I used it): the locations of the above three frames from Claremont Road would now be directly over the A12; the last image of this sequence, the photograph at the top of this post would have been relatively close to the remaining stub of Claremont Road (although almost certainly to the right), which I photographed in 2014, below.

Of the photographs that replicated those taken previously on black and white film, one was from the footbridge over the Central Line from Dyers Hall Road; the other two were on Colville Road. One of the 2014 versions of the Colville Road photographs shows more of the trees in the cemetery on the far side of the road and Central Line, which clearly shows that these are the same. The angle of the second image is almost certainly less accurate.

Having walked the route from Leytonstone to Leyton stations as I had done in December 1993, I then got the tube to Wanstead, where I got out to take a couple of photographs from the footbridge over Eastern Avenue. One of these, looking southwest towards a couple of houses which were demolished to provide space for a slip road off Eastern Avenue before it enters the cut-and-cover tunnel under George Green the road, and, parallel to this, to join Wigram Road to Elm Close, the latter road otherwise having been entirely marooned by the new road scheme. The new footbridge also needed to be wider and a wall built to mitigate the traffic noise for those residents that remained. 

I also took a photograph from the footbridge looking in the opposite direction, northeast, towards Claybury. The house nearest to the bridge was boarded up at the time, and I suppose I must have thought that this too was to be demolished. The photograph taken in 2014 shows the same house with a large extension to its side; possibly the windows were boarded in anticipation of this building work–or it might have been under the threat of demolition, but this was not necessary for the road as built. The photograph above also shows extensions and attic conversions visible across the nearest row of houses: the two semi-detatched houses on the end are nearly unrecognisable as a result. The graffiti in the photograph from 1994 includes the motto DAMP SQUIBB: Squibb was the name emblazoned on the plant machinery responsible for much of the demolition, but was also used as something of a tag–perhaps in an accusatory manner–in the graffiti used along the route, visible again on the corrugated iron in the first photograph taken in December 1993 on Dyers Hall Road.

Lomography Fantôme 8 - single roll review

Lomography Fantôme 8 35mm film

Approaching two years ago at the time of writing, I posted a short 'single roll' review on the Lomography Berlin Kino 400 film. This had been one of the rolls of film that I had won as part of the #ShittyCameraChallenge prize (sponsored by David Walster - @196photo on Twitter), four different rolls of 35mm black and white film, all of which were new to me. One of the other rolls was Lomography Fantôme 8; like the other Lomomgraphy film, the box has the description '35mm KINO film', but unlike the 'Berlin' film, Fantôme 8's origins are not those of a camera film, used to generate a negative–which its low ISO of 8 indicates. According to Alex Luyckx, Fantôme 8 is Orwo DP31. Orwo's data sheet describes it thus:

ORWO duplicating positive film DP 31 serves as a film for the production of intermediate positives (master positives). Due to is panchromatic sensitisation this film can be used for duplicating from black & white negatives as well as from colour negatives producing well-balanced grey values referring to original colours. Special features of this film are the excellent resolving power and the extraordinary fine grain

As a very low ISO film, I had been anticipating that I'd want to use the roll of Fantôme 8 for something specific which would take advantage of its particular characteristics, rather than 'everyday' film photography. Last week I wanted to make an interpositive to create a print in negative from a negative, and naturally thought of the Fantôme 8 for precisely the qualities the data sheet describes (this, incidentally, was for the Undertow exhibition). I shot half the roll and developed it as needed, then decided that I may well as well find the time to use the remainder of the film. For the purposes of making the interpositive, I used a tripod and my Canon A-1 SLR; at 8 ISO, there are few situations in which hand-holding a camera with Fantôme 8 is practical, but I did expose a couple of frames hand-held, both of which were with the lens wide open at f1.8 and a fairly slow shutter speed. The second image below was at 1/20th, which will have probably introduced a small amount of camera shake, leading it to be less sharp as a result; the first image, silhouetting bare branches against a bright sky at a medium distance was rather easier 

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

The first image above was shot on the end of the half of the roll I had used first, and the high contrast of the image was fairly evident. I used Kodak HC-110 at dilution H, 1+63 from concentrate, with a time of 14 minutes at 20ºC (the Orwo data sheet, unsurprisingly for a motion picture film, gives D96 as a developer). The film has probably the clearest base of any I've used–and was also extremely curly once developed. Having used half the film first, and assessing the results, this gave me an idea of how to approach using the remainder of the film. Thanks to its high contrast, in terms of subjects, for most frames I avoided including much or any sky in the composition, concerned it would render almost entirely bright and featureless (as a panchromatic film, it would have been possible to use a yellow filter); the image below was one of the few with a significant area of sky in the frame.

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

I may have been cautious in this, but the few frames with bright sky and bare branches silhouetted against it brought up a different problem in scanning: the clear base introduced a form of halation in the  scanning of the negatives, with the light of the scanner passing through these clear areas and reflecting back inside the scanner. This is an effect I've noticed with a few other films, but this was particularly intrusive here. In the image below it is a rather disruptive artefact of the scanning process; I imagine that darkroom printing would not have the same problem.

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

Close-up crop from scan

Given Fantôme 8's characteristics, I had hoped for overcast weather conditions for photographing, not uncommon here in February, but instead I found it was an afternoon of intermittent, if hazy sunshine. To lessen the high contrast of the film, using the Canon A-1, with its double exposure capability, on a number of frames, I was able to use the technique of pre-exposure to raise the shadow values. To do this, I first shot a frame of a grey card without focussing three and a half stops below the camera's indicated exposure, then pushed in the multiple exposure switch before engaging the film advance, which, with the multiple exposure switch engaged, simply cocks the shutter without moving the film. After development, the frames which had pre-exposure were easily distinguishable on the negatives, although in scanning, with many frames the differences were not as great as I might have expected.

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8 and pre-exposure

The most successful use of this technique is demonstrated in a pair of frames in which the subject was the low winter sun reflecting of a puddle, with the surroundings otherwise in shadow, which wouldn't be a subject easy to expose for a film with greater latitude: the pre-exposure here opens up the shadow detail just enough to define the landscape which becomes a little lost in the first image, where more exposure would lose detail in the highlights.

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8

Canon A-1 with Lomography Fantôme 8 and pre-exposure

A better test would be to print from these negatives in the darkroom, to be able to properly appreciate the difference the pre-exposure has made. However, for some of the images here, it does appear to have benefitted the negatives. As a general preference, longer tonal scales in negatives I find easier to work with (which was, in part, the frustration I felt with Ferrania P30); for many or most subjects it's a general look that I prefer, and, as a technique, using pre-exposure with Fantôme 8 here has softened some of the film's particular qualities. Many of the examples of the film that I've seen online play on these high-contrast qualities, and, had I been wanting that look, and found subjects appropriate for it, Fantôme 8 would have been ideal: I do feel that I found it a bit more flexible than I had anticipated. With the some of the compositions in which I was mindful in not including the sky, I found that there was something–a little–of the 'ungrounded' quality of some of Muybridge's photographs of Yosemite (on a much less grand scale of course) which I had been looking at again recently, in which the lack of a horizon or discernible foreground places the viewer in an uncertain relation to the scene depicted. Having used the film initially for a purpose not dissimilar to its original usage, then, finding the right subject matter and an appropriate technique for the film's limitations, I found myself liking Lomography Fantôme 8 rather more than I had expected to.

Sources/further reading

Mastering the new Lomography Fantome Kino 8

Orwo DP31 data sheet (PDF)

Alex Luyckx on Lomography Fantome 8

Fantome 8 on the casualphotophile

Fantome 8 on 35mmc

Kentmere Pan 100

Kentmere Pan 100 35mm film

It's become something of a commonplace to describe how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has altered the perception of time, simultaneously stretching and squashing it, making everything from 'before' feel unusually distant, separated. I wrote a post in November 2019 about Kentmere Pan 400 after its rebranding, with the prominent 'pan' added to the name, and in it I compared this to the Ilford Pan 400 film I'd written about previously (being one of two cheaper Ilford films which had only recently then become more widely available in the UK, while the point of comparison being that the Kentmere films are made by Harman, Ilford's parent company at a similar lower price than Ilford's other films); having heard that these-the Ilford Pan films-were to be discontinued, naturally, I then wanted to write about Kentmere Pan 100 as a logical comparison to Ilford Pan 100 and as a companion to the Kentmere Pan 400 post. I hadn't used the slower Kentmere film as much as the 400 previously, and I began as I would with any other film new to me, by exposing a roll for a latitude test. This was done on the day (check) that my work announced that they were moving from being face to face to online for the forseeable future, a week before the UK government issued its general 'stay at home' order.

Subsequently, I used Kentmere Pan 100 quite a bit over the next year and a half, in early autumn 2020, as the initial restrictions were eased and I went back to working face to face, as part of my plan to use the Olympus Pen EE3 half frame camera for the year leading up to the tenth anniversary of this blog, then at the start of 2021 when restrictions were back and I was recovering from my first Covid infection, taking allowed walks for exercise, and taking a camera with me. I had long planned to write this post after having used the film as much as I had; I had thought I should do so as the second anniversary of the pandemic and my first test of the film came around in March this year, but that came and went. 

Kentmere Pan 100 in medium format

Then, at the start of this month, on December 1st, Ilford announced that the Kentmere films were being produced in medium format, having only been previously available in 35mm. This provided the motivation to finish this post, and to add the medium format results to it, and, although I have so far only shot a single roll in medium format, all the tests made so far on 35mm film obviously are still relevant.

Kentmere Pan 100 latitude test contact sheet

I made the latitude test using the Canon A-1; compared to Ilford Pan 100, Kentmere Pan 100 does appear to show greater latitude, although the test was slightly marred by one set of frames being double exposed somehow. The top row of frames on the contact sheet above were exposed at 12-25-50-100-200-400 and developed in Ilfotec LC29 diluted 1+19 for 7 minutes at 20ºC. The lower three rows were rated at box speed, but with some bracketing. One stop either side of box speed scanned well; at 400, the shadow detail starts to look lacking, while at 25, two stops overexposed, the midtones and highlights start to look less separated, making scanning a little more difficult, but probably still printable with some care. In comparison with Kentmere Pan 400, the 100-speed version has less latitude, which is probably in part a function of its contrast, with higher speed films generally being lower in contrast by their nature.

As part of my usual testing of film stocks, I pushed–and pulled–Kentmere Pan 100. I used the film quite a bit during the winter months of 2020-21, and as a result, pushing the film often made sense in terms of working with available light. My first attempts at pushing one stop to 200 and used Ilfotec LC29, which appeared to provide a little more contrast, although most of the photographs taken on that first pushed film were in autumn sunshine, with bright light but relatively low, against deeper shadows. This did suit some of the subjects, as in the second image below.

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 200, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 200, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

The second roll of Kentmere Pan 100 at a rating of 200 was developed in exactly the same way, but using the Voigtländer Vito B, with an older lens from the Canon A-1's standard FD-fit 50mm f1.8 lens gave a different feel to the images. These photographs were taken on a couple of bright days in very early January, with very low sunlight, and it might have been more appropriate to pull the film to lower the contrast for many of these images (the top image being of a lower-contrast subject perhaps demonstrates this), but I'd decided to push the film without considering what the weather conditions might be: the results were not unsympathetic however.

Voigtländer Vito B with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 200, Ilfotec LC 29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

Voigtländer Vito B with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 200, Ilfotec LC 29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

As I used the Kentmere Pan 100 over quite a number of months, as well as the different tests, I also used a few different developers, not with the intention of comparing the results, but more simply being the case that I was using whichever black and white developer I currently had in use. It would have been instructive to have been more programmatic in this regard, but I hadn't thought that my testing of the film would have occurred over quite such a long period of time. Harman's own data sheet for Kentmere Pan 100 does not provide any timings for a two-stop push to 400 (the metal 35mm canister does have a box next to that 100 and 200 to mark an exposure rating, logically for 400), but this would be a good comparison to the Ilford Pan 100 film. For that particular film, I estimated an extended development time using Ilfotec LC29, with what I felt at the time were rather mixed results. I tried a different approach then with semi-stand development. I used R09 One Shot diluted to 1+150 for 3 hours, agitating on each hour interval (a method used previously with Ilford HP5 Plus: the theory behind using such a high dilution of Rodinal is to reduce the contrast that accompanies push-processing; no doubt most of the development has occurred by the one-hour stage, but I wanted to give the shadow areas as much opportunity to develop as possible). I did the same with Kentmere Pan 100.

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 400, 3 hours semi-stand development Adox Rodinal 1+150

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 400, 3 hours semi-stand development Adox Rodinal 1+150

The results (above) were comparable to the approach with the Ilford Pan 100 film, and there's a smoothness to the grain which suggests this to be sympathetic to rating the film at 400, given all the caveats one would want to make in relation to push processing. However, I've not tried a more conventional development regime for a two-stop push with this film to see what the difference might be against this extended semi-stand development.

There are probably more conditions under which one might push a film, compared to pull-processing, but I did also try this with Kentmere Pan 100. As regards the comments above with the one-stop push with the Vito B camera, the roll which I rated at 50 might have been better with higher contrast subjects–as pulling a film reduces its contrast–most of this roll of the film was shot under overcast conditions in January. I used the Kiev-4 rangefinder for this, and it may be a fortuitous combination of lighting conditions, reduced development, and the lens used (the Helios-103), but the results pulled one stop in Rodinal appeared to me to be both smooth and sharp, and possibly represents an achievable look of Kentmere Pan 100 that, of all the different exposure/development combinations I've tried while testing the film, I liked the most (the real test would be to print in the darkroom of course).

Kiev-4 with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 50, Rodinal 1+50, 9m 20ºC

Kiev-4 with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 50, Rodinal 1+50, 9m 20ºC

I also used the film with a couple of 35mm half-frame cameras, and the relatively fine grain made the film sympathetic to the smaller frame size, although the film used in the Olympus Pen EE3 coincided with that camera's lens becoming loose and providing slightly-out-of-focus images. This was part of my year-long re-engagement, an ultimately frustrating one, with the Pen EE3, with the Kentmere Pan 100 film being one that I had in my camera through the summer of 2020.

Olympus Pen EE3 with Kentmere Pan 100, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 9m 18ºC

Agat 18K with Kentmere Pan 100, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 7m 20ºC

As written about at the start of this post, what made me finally gather all the images together and write this post was the introduction of Kentmere Pan 100 in medium format rollfilm. As with the 35mm version of the film, this is clearly intended to compete with other lower priced films currently available, and no doubt it makes sense for Harman to be part of that market for medium format. Just over a week ago, on the shortest day of the year, I shot a roll of medium format Kentmere Pan 100 with the Voigtländer Bessa rangefinder. If it hadn't been for this particular post, a 400-speed film would have been better for the lighting conditions, as, on an overcast day in the middle of winter, I found I was having to use a slower shutter speed or wider aperture than I might have liked, and was using the camera hand-held too. 

Voigtländer Bessa with Kentmere Pan 100, Kodak HC-110, 1+31, 5m45s at 22ºC

However, medium format can be quite forgiving and returning to the film in that new format, the results of which were very promising–the film dried flat, and was easy to scan, and I suspect as a choice of emulsions, I'd be more likely to choose Kentmere Pan 100 in medium format perhaps more so than in 35mm in future. As a lower-priced film stock, Kentmere Pan 100 fits a gap, especially given the current circumstances as I write, but I generally feel it's relatively unremarkable–it doesn't compare to Ilford FP4 Plus or Delta 100 as Harman's similar speed films–but as I've written above in relation to pulling it to a rating of 50 with the Kiev-4, with judicious exposure and development the results can be better than one might expect for a 'budget' black and white film, which makes its introduction into medium format (as with Kentmere Pan 400) all the more welcome.

Kiev-4 with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 50, Rodinal 1+50, 9m 20ºC

Siluet Elektro with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 80, Rodinal 1+50 15m 20ºC

Olympus Pen EE3 with Kentmere Pan 100, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 9m 18ºC

Agat 18K with Kentmere Pan 100, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 7m 20ºC

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 7m 20ºC

Kodak Retina IIa with Kentmere Pan 100, Ars-Imago #9 (Rodinal formula) 1+50, 15m 20ºC

Voigtländer Vito B with Kentmere Pan 100 rated 200, Ilfotec LC 29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 200, Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 8m 20ºC

Canon A-1 with Kentmere Pan 100, rated 400, 3 hours semi-stand development Adox Rodinal 1+150

Voigtländer Bessa with Kentmere Pan 100, Kodak HC-110, 1+31, 5m45s at 22ºC

Kentmere Pan 100 data sheet (PDF)