Retracings

Dyers Hall Road, Leytonstone, 31st December 1993

In a post that I wrote for this blog ten years ago, 'Twenty Years Since', I mentioned–almost in passing–photographs taken of houses being demolished to make way for what was then called the M11 Link Road, now the A12. The few words that described the experience of taking these photographs belies what was, in retrospect, an important formative experience or experiences. The taking of the these photographs was tied up with learning the craft of photography itself, following a basic introduction to photography as part of my Foundation Course in Art & Design a few weeks earlier, then receiving a secondhand Praktica BCA for Christmas in 1993.

I had been aware of the planning blight that accompanied the road scheme years earlier, although I hadn’t known that this was what it was. A journey into central London would involve taking the Central Line from Gants Hill or Redbridge stations; this branch of the Central Line is in a tunnel under Eastern Avenue, resurfacing just before Leytonstone station for a couple of stops, making this brief view from the windows of the tube train a diverting contrast to the darkness of the rest of the way. Houses backing on to the line where it runs above ground here had begun to be demolished or fall into disrepair years earlier: I distinctly remember the graffiti spelling out WHY BOTHER? on the back of a house from the late 1980s, later to provoke the rejoinder WHY NOT? (These were then joined by CRAWLING KING SNAKES KICK YO ASS.)

What had been an occasional journey while I was at school in nearby Wanstead became a daily one when I started college in 1993; I was all the more aware then that the demolitions were something that was actively happening, rather than what might have appeared to be a few streets fallen into desperate disrepair that I’d see whenever travelling into town. The protests around the tree on George Green in the autumn term was the moment that the active resistance to the road scheme made itself felt. (Rather pointlessly, one night after being kicked out of The George with a friend, we pulled down a fence post that had just been put up around the tree–there appeared to be no security at that stage–delaying the construction of the road by what must have been minutes at best, my only attempt at direct action).

The weather around Christmas in 1993 had been largely cold and wet, with some snow; the last day of the year, a Friday, turned fine and sunny, prompting me to decide that it was the perfect opportunity to use my new secondhand camera, with a roll of Ilford HP5 Plus bought for a holiday college project, which was to illustrate a number of words that we had been given. The photos are a record of that change in the weather. I took the tube to Leytonstone, and walked to Leyton, taking photographs along the way. I took some photographs in the British Museum afterwards on the same day; the last two photographs of the M11 Link Road sequence were taken from a moving train. These may have been from Leyton in the direction of Stratford, or I think I may have taken an eastbound train from Leyton back to Leytonstone, before then switching over (or under as the case is at Leytonstone) to take a Westbound train to Tottenham Court Road for the museum.

I returned on a number of occasions in the following months to take more photographs, neither systematic not comprehensive, but with the awareness that this felt like something of which it was worth making a visual record (the one time that I chanced upon evictions happening on Claremont Road in the summer of 1994, I had a part-used roll of film in my camera and no spare). The photographs were printed in the darkroom at college, rather inexpertly, and the images ended up used in artwork then, in collages and paintings, and I drew on these the following year when I’d left London and started a degree in Fine Art.

Dyers Hall Road, Leytonstone, 31st December 2013

I had occasion to revisit these photographs earlier this year, and needed to find the original negatives; in doing so I also found a set of negatives from 2013 in which I had attempted to match the locations from the photographs of what was then twenty ago as closely as possible. These negatives weren’t scanned at the time–I had intended a blog post then–and the moment passed. I had scanned the original negatives in 2007, and had posted these online in 2008, and rather over-promised the content of these images by calling this the ‘M11 Link Road Archive’ (an actual archive of material related to the M11 Link Road and the protests resides at the Museum of London). Returning to some of the original files, the quality of these original scans was relatively poor, with scanning artefacts and clipped highlights and shadows in many of the frames. (Scanning issues–software and hardware–partly explain the absence of posts on this blog this year, although the main excuse was the writing up of my PhD). Having found the negatives from both 1993 and 2013, I was able to scan these recently with better results for this post.

What I didn’t know at the time was that many of the houses along the route were or had been inhabited by artists. Acme Studios had been offered a number of the compulsorily-purchased houses by the Department of Transport in the 1980s; by the time I was taking these photographs, the houses along the route were occupied by the few original residents who had not moved away, some of the Acme artists who became involved in resisting the demolitions, and the first wave of anti-roads protestors, some of whom had come from Twyford Down, just outside Winchester–where I was going on to study–and many subsequently moved onto to protest the Newbury Bypass after the M11 campaign.

For a few years I probably didn’t think about this part of my life very much; I happened to cycle over the road on the Quartermile Lane bridge from Hackney just before it opened in 1999. I didn’t have a camera on me at the time, and thought I’d return to take photographs of the empty road, but I never did. Then in 2003, a site-specific sound piece by the artist Graeme Miller called LINKED was installed along the route. This required collecting a radio receiver and headphones, available from local amenities–we got ours from Wanstead Leisure Centre–and walking a route from Wanstead to Hackney Wick, along which one would encounter transmitters that broadcast audio loops consisting of extracts of oral history weaved with music into soundscapes.

Related to Miller’s LINKED, in 2008 I attended a number of seminars at LCC’s Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC), part of their research project Road: Artists and the Stop The M11 Link Road Campaign, 1984–1994; the ninth issue of PARC’s journal, Fieldstudy, was devoted to this research project, and featured a few of my photographs from 1993-94. Last year, Graeme Miller revisited LINKED: since its initial installation, with most of the receivers being placed on lamp posts along the road, a slow attrition had reduced these in number over time, some going as the Hackney Wick end of the route was swallowed up by the 2012 Olympic Park, others from the streetlights being knocked over, or the transmitters being unknowingly discarded by contractors. In anticipation of the project’s 20th anniversary, Miller revisited it for Re-LINK last year where the receivers were made available again for 48 hours and a roundtable discussion was hosted by Leytonstone Library; in conjunction with the exhibition Radical Landscapes at the William Morris Gallery, three open days for LINKED were planned, the first was in November, the next on 20th January and 17th February 2024. (In the intermediate years I had other opportunities to revisit Miller’s LINKED a few times, re-walking the route in different groups, thanks to the artwork being used as a PhD case study by Dr. Sarah Wishart.)

In 2013, attempting–as best I could–to find the same viewpoints as the photographs taken in 1993, it wasn’t always clear as to where exactly each picture had been taken then: I hadn’t taken any notes. However, the sequence on the contact sheet, and the linear nature of the route from station to station made this relatively easy in most cases, but for some photographs this would have meant hovering above the A12 itself, as with most of those taken along Claremont Road itself. Some of the photographs in my retracings from 2013 and 2014 were taken with a Zenit 11, some with Praktica MTL3, but for both cameras I used a Prakticar f1.8 50mm lens, the same design lens as I would have had on my Praktica BC1, and then the BCA which replaced it later in 1994 (Edit 25/01/24: Having rediscovered the contact prints from the photographs taken on the 31st December 2013, I had actually used an Olympus OM10 for this set of photographs).

The photographs from 1993 start at Dyers Hall Road. This road formed a shallow loop underneath the Gospel Oak to Barking branch of what was then the North London Line, joining Grove Green Road either end in a slightly more direct route along the Central Line. The A12 reduced Dyers Hall Road into two stubs, the shorter one now with the suffix 'South'.

For the pedestrian, or cyclist, the two ends of Dyers Hall Road are joined by a footpath and cycle lane which runs alongside the brick wall of the A12 here. At the end of Dyers Hall Road South, there is a footbridge that crosses the A12 to Norman Road on the eastern side; there had been a shorter footbridge here in 1993, which afforded a view across cleared ground to the railway bridge, a section of its brick arches already replaced by a long straight steel span.

A second photograph from the bridge looks over back gardens on Dyers Hall Road; the houses in the background face onto Grove Green Road. I took one photograph in 2013 looking across from the far end of the bridge towards the rear of those same houses on Grove Green Road, but a truer position would be on the footbridge itself, just past the line of the railway, where the previous footbridge would have ended–as in the third image below.

The next photographs are from Claremont Road, which became the focus of protest in 1994. The first of these are at the end of the right angle where it comes off Grove Green Road, two houses, one with a gibbet fixed to a chimney and a poster in a window: M11 LINK ROAD/DEVASTATING OUR COMMUNITIES. I’m reasonably sure that these houses were at the northern end of the road: the fence that runs alongside borders the Central Line. Behind would have been the Cathall Road bridge over the railway. In 2013 I took two photographs looking in the same general direction, one from that bridge, which would be somewhat behind the location of these houses, the other from the wide pavement before the bridge, which would be to the west.

A photograph of a house with a front door, curtains and a cat painted on breeze blocks is one of the pictures that would now be entirely where the A12 is now, or above, as the road sits in a cutting here.

There are two photographs at the southern end of Claremont Road where it turns back to Grove Green Road. After the A12 was built a small section of the southern end of Claremont Road remained; there was a little space here to build some houses, facing onto the road, thus ensuring that Claremont Road as a residential address still exists. A photograph looking back from here to Grove Green Road roughly replicates the same view of that from 1993.

The next photographs are from Colville Road. This was set a little further back from the Central Line than Claremont Road: houses which backed onto the railway were all demolished, along with some houses facing those at its northern end, where the angle of Colville Road was changed to accommodate the A12, running behind its brick wall but a stretch of terraced housing on the road’s western side survived.

This change in the course of the road can be clearly seen in the photograph from 2013 which looks along the wall, replicating a picture from 1993 looking over the corrugated iron fence to the end of terrace, side-on to the first photograph of Colville Road.

From here another photograph looks across to the Central Line, showing a 1962 stock Central Line train passing St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic cemetery in the far background (these trains, which I had grown up with, were phased out during that year I spent commuting on the Central Line, going to college, replaced by the current 1992 stock). A photograph of this view would be straight on to the brick wall; I took a picture in 2013 which I think must be looking up and more to the right.

There are two photographs from 1993 that mark the end of the walk from the entrance to the rail yard that lay to the southwest of Leyton Station; this would seem to extend down to Temple Mills, although I haven’t been ably to find whether Leyton Rail Yard was separate from that of Temple Mills, which is now the Eurostar depot. The view from here shows the horizon opening up to take in a skyline in which one can see One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, new in 1993 and the tallest building in the country at that point, past three tower blocks by Bow Church station, the Bryant and May match factory, across what is now the 2012 Olympic Park, marked by the two squat UEL residential towers, to the tower blocks clustered around Wick Lane and Victoria Park. The view now is almost entirely different: trying to locate the exact viewpoint would take one to the edge of the Leyton Mills retail park; slightly to the left, on the bridge over the A12 itself, shows a broadly similar view to that of 1993, with most of the horizon filled with development on the 2012 Olympic site. One Canada Square can still just be seen, as can the tower blocks by Wick Lane.

A second photograph in 1993 was taken at right angles to the first, looking back towards Leyton station, dominated by railway buildings facing the rise in the high road as it passes over the railway line; the current station building’s roof can just be see to their left, mostly obscured. A similar view today looks across the ramp and stairs into the retail park, with the station’s pitched roof in roughly the same position. I didn’t try to replicate the two photographs shot from the moving train in 1993, as I couldn’t be at all sure exactly where they were taken.

Although never directly involved in the campaigns and protests, not knowing about the community of artists there, feeling like an outsider despite it being relatively local, seeing and recording the progress of these demolitions in 1993 and 1994 affected me in part I think as the houses were very much like that I had grown up in, and was something that I could see happening as I took the tube to college every day. There was also an aspect of being confronted by the arbitrary use of the power of the state at this formative age, bound up as it felt at the time with the Criminal Justice Bill, much in the news at the time, passed into law in November 1994, with many of its measures seemingly targeted at the young and politically active, and how this galvanised, pre-internet, before social media, a grassroots opposition (Labour, under Tony Blair–first as shadow home secretary as the bill made its way through parliament, then as leader of the opposition following John Smith’s death–abstained when the bill received its third reading). My awareness of this came through a very different media ecology from today: posters on the streets, what alternative press I happened to come across, like SchNEWS, but mostly how it filtered through into the music of the time and the wider conversations around it in part through the ‘polytextuality’ (as Dean L. Biron describes it) of the music’s physical artefacts–the artwork and liner notes–and how this was reflected in the music press and the conversations that were part of meeting new people, new ideas, starting a college course, anticipating leaving home. When I took the photographs on the last day of 1993, photography was physical (it would be many years before I even saw a digital camera, though I did have my first experiences with Adobe Photoshop then, with a faint intuition that this would be a transformative technology), enabling me to return to the negatives thirty years later and create images anew from their matrices.

Fieldstudy issue 9 (PDF file)
Graeme Miller LINKED
Sarah Wishart, 'A Provenance of Performance'
SchNEWS Issue 3 December 1994
Dean L. Biron, 'Writing and Music: Album Liner Notes'

Ilford Pan 400

Ilford Pan 400

Having used Ilford Pan 100 last year, and from the research online for my post on the film, I wrote then that "Pan 400 appears to be a bit more popular, or at least seems to come up more often than Pan 100"; as a companion piece to my tests of Ilford Pan 100, it was natural to want to do the same for the 400-speed film. I bought my Ilford Pan 400 at Process Supplies Ltd where I'd also got the Pan 100 film previously; when buying the film, I was told that the Ilford Pan films are to be discontinued in favour of the two Kentmere films, Kentmere 100 and 400. The implication from this is that the Pan films and Kentmere films are not the same emulsion, although it's not exactly clear how different they may be: the two brands do have different development times. To support the idea that the Kentmere films are replacing the Ilford Pan films, the Kentmere films have recently had their packaging redesigned - and the words 'PAN 100' and 'PAN 400' are as prominent as the Kentmere brand: on Ilford's website, there's a post from last year about the redesign that states "Kentmere 100 and 400 are now officially known as Kentmere PAN 100 and PAN 400..." (Edit 8/11/19: see the post on Kentmere Pan 400 here).

As I wrote in my post on Pan 100, the Ilford Pan films have not been generally available in the UK; the data sheet states that:

The ILFORD range of PAN 100 and PAN 400 black and white camera films are not generally distributed and sold worldwide, they are only made available in selected markets.

Like Pan 100, Ilford Pan 400 is a traditional, cubic-type emulsion black and white film from Harman under the Ilford brand, 'Pan', an abbreviation of panchromatic, is indicative of the basic nature of these films. A thread on the Amateur Photographer forum quotes an unattributed 'Ilford employee' on the Ilford Pan films that: "They are based on FP4+ and HP5+ technology, but are produced to lower specifications and tolorances [sic]. There are also a few posts online that suggest the Ilford Pan films were discontinued some years ago and I speculated in my post on Pan 100 that production might have ceased for a period - a data sheet from 2002 mentions both 35mm and 120 - the films are only available in 35mm, for the time being of course. By contrast to the Ilford Pan 100 films that I used last year, the Pan 400 that I used this year had no printing inside the box - an indication of imminent discontinuation perhaps, or just their budget status.

As is my usual approach when testing a new film, I made a latitude test, rating the film successively from an exposure index of 100 through to 3200, in effect going from two stops over-exposed to three stops underexposed. Developing times for Ilford Pan 400 (and Pan 100) are not listed on Ilford's standard development chart listing their other Ilford-branded films (except Ortho Copy Plus); for this post I used times from the Massive Dev Chart (the data sheet from 2002 does give times - the same as on the Massive Dev Chart - for Ilford Pan 400 at meter settings from 200 to 3200). The film for the latitude test was developed in R09 One Shot at a dilution of 1+25 for 6 minutes at 20ºC.

Ilford Pan 400 latitude test

The test showed the film to have reasonably good latitude: two stops overexposed and the compression of tones towards the highlights begins to become unattractive; underexposed, shadow detail starts to be lost, although in scanning the negatives it was possible to pull out more detail. Inevitably, with a lower contrast subject, over- and underexposure have less effect than higher contrast subjects - the top row on the contact sheet above is higher in contrast, with brighter highlights and deeper shadows; the subject in the second row is more even across the frame.

Ilford Pan 400, two stops overexposed

Ilford Pan 400, three stops underexposed

Following the latitude test, I wanted to try both push- and pull-processing. Pull-processing tends to be less demanded by shooting conditions, though with a 400-speed film there may be occasions when it might be advisable. I shot one roll of Ilford Pan 400, rated 200 and developed in R09 One Shot at a dilution of 1+25 for 5 minutes and 30 seconds at a temperature of 19ºC. Pull-processing does reduce contrast, but faster films are inherently lower in contrast than slow films, so this may be less necessary as a result. Some of the shots on this roll were on subjects with differing degrees of contre-jour illumination; the pull-processing may have helped a little here, though the second shot below, with a brightly lit late afternoon sky towards a low sun would always be problematic in terms of retaining detail across the frame: a simple scan of the negative (as is the case here) might not be as good as a darkroom print, albeit no doubt needing plenty of burning-in for the sky, and possibly spilt-grade contrast printing too.

Ilford Pan 400, exposed at EI 200 and pull-processed

Ilford Pan 400, exposed at EI 200 and pull-processed

For push-processing, a test for a one stop push to 800 did not seem necessary: frames rated at 800 on the latitude test showed a reasonably full range of tones without extra development. I did push the film to 1600 and 3200 respectively, using Ilfotec LC29 as a developer for these tests rather than R09. The two-stop push to 1600 emphasised the grain but not unattractively so; the increased contrast made for negatives which were easy to scan. I shot most of these in the British Museum, with some galleries being illuminated with low-light levels, making the two-stop push an ideal compromise.

Ilford Pan 400, rated 1600, developed in Ilfotec LC29 1+19, 14m at 20ºC

I then shot a roll at 3200, some at dusk on an overcast day, some on the London Underground. With a three-stop push, the contrast of some subjects meant an inevitable lack of shadow detail, but, again, the push-processing here was an acceptable compromise.

Ilford Pan 400, rated 3200, developed in Ilfotec LC29 1+9, 11m at 20ºC

Ilford Pan 400, rated 3200, developed in Ilfotec LC29 1+9, 11m at 20ºC

Ideally, this post would then test the Kentmere Pan 400 film to compare it with Ilford Pan 400 (edit 8/11/19: I have now tested Kentmere Pan 400, posted here); I suspect that for most uses, the differences would not be significant: both films are fast, traditional black and white panchromatic emulsions at a lower price than Ilford HP5 Plus or Kodak Tri-X. Generally, the results with Ilford Pan 400 were perfectly acceptable, if lacking anything to distinguish it from other lower-priced black and white films that seem to have proliferated in recent years. In my post on its slower companion, Pan 100, I wrote how that film reminded me of the Foma films in terms of grain; by comparison, Ilford Pan 400 doesn't seem to me as alike to Fomapan 400: Pan 400's grain is perhaps a little more regular, a little less gritty. Perversely, perhaps, I found the results when either pull- or push processing more to my liking: down rated, the grain feels a little tighter, smoother, while pushing the film a couple of stops gives the negatives enough of a contrast boost to make the images feel tonally more dynamic as well as providing better results from a straight scan (of course, mush also depends on the subject contrast of the original scene photographed). Again, ideally I would also test these assertions with printing in the darkroom too; however all the images on this post (except the contact sheet) are scanned from the negative.

Ilford Pan 400 shot with Agat 18K (half frame)

Kiev-4 with Ilford Pan 400 rated 200

Canon A-1 with Ilford Pan 400 at box speed

Canon A-1 with Ilford Pan 400 rated 1600

Canon A-1 with Ilford Pan 400 rated 3200

Ilford Pan 100 and Pan 400 data sheet (PDF)

Kodak T-Max P3200 - back from the discontinued list

Kodak T-Max P3200

KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX P3200 Black & White Negative Film ⁄ 3200TMZ is a multi-speed continuous-tone panchromatic black-and-white negative film that combines high to ultra-high film speeds with finer grain than that of other fast black-and-white films. It is especially useful for very fast action; for dimly lighted scenes where you can’t use flash; for subjects that require good depth of field combined with fast shutter speeds; and for handholding telephoto lenses for fast action or in dim light. It is an excellent choice for nighttime photography.

T-Max P3200 data sheet

When I wrote my previous post on Kodak T-Max P3200 it had been discontinued for two years; with Kodak's rationalisation of their product lines at the time, I would not have predicted that the film would be reintroduced just fours years later. Many online commentators are more excited by the reappearance of Ektachrome, and perhaps understandably so; some photographers - myself included - would like to see Plus-X return, but it could be argued that as Kodak do already have a medium speed black and white emulsion in T-Max 100, that being able to compete with Ilford's Delta 3200 at the upper end of the speed table makes sense in terms of a market strategy. T-Max P3200 was first introduced in 1988, a whole ten years before Delta 3200; like Ilford's film it is essentially a fast film designed to be push-processed. The data sheet states that T-Max P3200's nominal speed is EI 1000 in T-Max developers, or EI 800 in other developers - some commentators make much of this fact in online pieces about the film, but Kodak are open about what the film is: the P before 3200 in the name denotes that the film is designed for push processing. Of course, the film cartridge is actually DX-coded to 3200, so, in cameras with DX-coding it will be exposed at EI 3200 unless manually set. No doubt, without instructions to the contrary, labs would also develop it as if shot at 3200. Like Delta 3200, Kodak T-Max P3200 is essentially a versatile high speed film, with excellent latitude and manageable contrast - two factors that important to the ability to successfully push a film.

When I last wrote about T-Max P3200, I hadn't made any evaluative tests with it: I had used a couple of rolls of out-of-date film for that post, as well as reflecting of first using the film in the mid-1990s, before Ilford also entered the market for ultra-fast films with Delta 3200. With a new batch of the film, I thought it was worth revisiting T-Max P3200 and I began, as with testing most new films, by making a latitude test.

Kodak T-Max P3200 latitude test contact sheet

The results from this first test appeared to demonstrate that T-Max P3200 has excellent latitude: although developed at the recommended time for being exposed at EI 3200, almost all frames yielded a usable image. Shadow detail was thin at 6400 and clearly lacking at 12800, but this is dependent on the subject contrast: this was less of a problem in images with a narrower brightness range (when choosing the two different shots for comparison at different exposure indexes, I deliberately to framed one shot with a sunlit foreground in the frame and deep shadows; for the other set of six frames, the subject was all in open shade, and therefore less extremes of light and dark). Those shots at lower exposure indexes performed very well indeed, perhaps unsurprising given T-Max P3200's true speed, but even when rated at 400, there was no real evidence of highlights blocking out. For a film with great latitude, contrast was not as flat as one might expect (compare, for example, Ilford XP2 Super, while a very different film - for all the reasons described on my post - it has very low contrast which must in part contribute to its wide latitude). The two images below, which were scanned fairly 'straight', without much in the way of any adjustments, demonstrate a difference of 5-stops exposure, developed together.

Kodak T-Max P3200, rated 400

Kodak T-Max P3200, rated 12,800

Kodak's data sheet for the film list a number of Kodak's own proprietary developers - none of which I habitually use. For the latitude test, I used Fomadon R09 diluted 1+25, for 8 minutes at 20ºC, derived from the Massive Dev Chart; most listings are annotated that the data is taken from a previous version of the film, but there is no reason to suspect the new iteration of T-Max P3200 is any different. With R09, the appearance of the film's grain is quite pronounced, as one would expect; initially I suspected that I might not like the combination of T-Max P3200 and R09, but, despite it appearing obtrusive in some images, generally the combination did not seem too objectionable. Of course, a fuller review of the film would include testing some of Kodak's recommended proprietary developers; previously I had used T-Max P3200 with ID11, Ilford's equivalent of Kodak's D76: the grain here does appear smoother than with R09. The data sheet also warns that T-Max P3200 will exhaust fixer more rapidly than other films, this is presumably due to the emulsion density of the film, and is worth bearing in mind when processing.

Kiev-4 with Kodak T-Max P3200, developed in Fomadon R09

Praktica BCA with Kodak T-Max P3200, developed in ID11

One note on Kodak's data sheet in the section on spectral sensitivity caught my eye:

The blue sensitivity of KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX Films is slightly less than that of other KODAK panchromatic black-and-white films. This enables the response of this film to be closer to the response of the human eye. Therefore, blues may be recorded as slightly darker tones with these films—a more natural rendition.

Having hardly ever used Kodak's T-Max films before, this was new to me. Some shots with Kodak T-Max P3200 in daylight with blue skies do look as though these were made with a yellow filter, as one might expect for most black and white films, however, Kodak T-Max P3200 is possibly the one film that might not feel like a natural choice to use for daylight photography in sunny conditions. The image below was shot on a bright autumn morning, and although the contrast between the brightness of the concrete and the sky enhances the effect, I was still impressed by the darkness of the blue sky without use of a filter.

Kiev-4 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 3200, developed in Fomadon RO9

Instead of bright sunny days, Kodak T-Max P3200 is really a film designed for more difficult lighting conditions. At a rating of EI 3200, the film is usually sensitive enough for hand-held night photographs under street lights - with relatively fast lenses - or dimly-lit interiors (it's always seemed to be a popular choice for gig photography, for example). These situations often provide brightly lit but highly localised areas surrounded by deep shadows, conditions less than ideal when pushing slower films, as pushing increases contrast. When it was discontinued, Kodak recommended using T-Max 400, push-processed, instead, but did admit that "The exception [to replacing T-Max P3200 with T-Max 400] would be extremely low light situations where P3200 might be able to pull out some shadow detail that would otherwise be lost". As the data sheet specifies, with T-Max P3200 "...you will obtain better shadow detail and highlight separation when you expose it at EI 3200 or 6400 than you can obtain with 400-speed films pushed by 3 stops."

Kiev-4 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 3200, developed in Fomadon R09

Kodak's data sheet includes developing times for rating the film up to EI 25,000; when making my tests, as well as shooting it at the 'box speed' of 3200, I wanted to test the film one stop either side of this, rating it at both 1600 and 6400. Judging from the latitude test, one could probably rate frames at both 1600 and 3200 on the same roll and develop this for the times for EI 3200 without any real drawback in quality: it's interesting to see on Kodak's data sheet how close the development times are for each stop in exposure, with some developers giving less than a minute difference between some stops. Quite possibly, most photographers developing the film themselves might have a margin of error in time (and temperature) that could encompass that amount of development fairly easily. Exposed and developed for EI 6400 does allow hand held shots in quite dark situations, which, when the film was new, must have seemed all the more impressive than perhaps it does today; I didn't find myself wishing for an extra stop or two, but further tests in the right developers at EI 12,800 and 25,000 possibly would not be as revelatory as they might promise.

Canon A-1 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 6400, developed in Ilfotec LC29

Although the name of the film rather suggests naturally exposing it at an exposure index of 3200, Kodak's data sheet has the telling sentence, "Because of its great latitude, you can expose this film at EI 1600 and yield negatives of high quality. There will be no change in the grain of the final print, but there may be a slight loss of shadow detail [over rating it at EI 800]." Rating the film at 1600 would appear to be the best balance of speed against grain and retention of shadow detail. For the test at EI 1600, I wanted to use R09 at a dilution of 1+50, rather than 1+25, having seen a number of examples online where this looked as though the grain may appear a little less pronounced.

Canon A-1 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 1600, developed in Fomadon R09

I shot much of the roll rated EI 1600 in the sort of conditions in which I would have first used the film two decades ago: in a museum, with low lighting, but with relatively bright, localised sources of light. The rest of this roll was shot in a variety of lighting conditions, and, overall, proabably gave the best results. A higher dilution of R09 may have helped the sharpness of the negatives; further tests at perhaps 1+75 and 1+100 may be instructive in this regard. Of course, I haven't made any tests with film developers recommended by Kodak for T-Max P3200, but rather I've tested those that I would habitually use instead. I also haven't made any direct comparisons with Ilford Delta 3200, as others have online (these look to show that T-Max P3200 has finer grain than Ilford's film): however, I've found this not to be exactly the case in my experience. Without making side-by-side comparisons (and, ideally, making darkroom prints of both), but looking at shots I've taken with Delta 3200 in 35mm, these may not have as fine a grain as T-Max P3200, but, to me, the grain of Delta 3200 appears softer, with T-Max P3200 harder, sharper perhaps, but perceptually more 'grainy' as a result.

Kodak Retina IIa with Ilford Delta 3200, developed in R09 One Shot

Kiev-4 with Kodak T-Max P3200, developed in Fomadon R09

For me, Ilford Delta 3200 has long been my ultra-fast film of choice, partly due to having been always available throughout most of my years of taking photographs, appearing on the market relatively soon after first I began developing my own negatives; that it is also produced in medium format gives it the edge over T-Max P3200. However, the return of Kodak T-Max P3200 is most welcome in what now appears a more volatile film market: some years ago, the variety of different films available was clearly shrinking, and T-Max P3200's original discontinuation was part of that - since then, even with other favoured films disappearing, there has been something of a small resurgence in the range of film currently on the market, a situation to which a company as dominant as Kodak once was has been slow to react.

Canon A-1 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 1600, developed in Fomadon R09

Canon A-1 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 3200, developed in Fomadon R09

Kiev-4 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 3200, developed in Fomadon R09

Canon A-1 with Kodak T-Max P3200 at EI 6400, developed in Ilfotec LC29

Sources/further reading
Kodak T-Max P3200 data sheet (PDF file)
T-Max P3200 on the Casual Photophile
Richardphotolab.com all-about-Kodak's-T-Max-P3200-film
Kodak T-Max-P3200 review on Parallax Photographic