Rollei Ortho 25 plus - single roll review

Rollei Ortho 25 plus in 35mm

"Although panchromatic films are used for nearly all general photography today, we should avoid prejudice against other emulsions since they may have practical and aesthetic applications. Both orthochromatic and blue-sensitive films are usually capable of higher contrast than panchromatic film. An orthochromatic film can be quite luminous in rendering foliage in the landscape since the foliage green is rendered relatively light, comparable to our visual response; caution must be exercised if the subject contains red-reflecting surfaces such as certain rocks, tree bark, and flowers, since these will be rendered quite dark. It can also be used in portraiture, where it will emphasise skin features such as lips and freckles, and darken (sometimes excessively) a ruddy complexion."

Ansel Adams, The Negative

Orthochromatic film has seen something of an (admittedly niche) increase in popularity in recent years, most notably with Ilford releasing its Ortho Plus in both 35mm and medium format after many years of only being available in sheet film sizes. My experiences with other orthochromatic emulsions, such as Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic and Kodagraph Ortho Negative film has often been one of attempting to tame their inherent high contrast to use the films for pictorial purposes, unlike the graphic arts applications that these were formulated for; other experiences with more general purpose orthochromatic camera films, such as the original Kodak Verichrome, Ilford Selochrome Fast Ortho and various glass plates, all involved using photographic material which was many decades old, where achieving any result in and of itself was far more important a consideration than the aesthetics of an orthochromatic rendering of a scene, thus negating, as Ansel Adams describes, the reasons one might favour orthochromatic over panchromatic film.

In my post on the Lomography Berlin Kino film, nearly six months ago now, I wrote of the #ShittyCameraChallenge prize I'd received (sponsored by David Walster - @196photo on Twitter), four different rolls of 35mm black and white film, none of which I'd used before. I also wrote about how I usually like to test films a little more fully before writing about them, but given the four all very different emulsions, I thought I might post 'single roll' reviews of these particular films. Towards the end of August, I shot the Rollei Ortho 25 plus with my Voigtländer Vito B. I chose this camera as I thought that its lens might be a sympathetic fit to the look of an orthographic emulsion, although this is probably too nuanced to really matter that much. Despite my best intentions, after developing the film languished until such time that I had to scan it and work over the digital images (generally, just spotting and adjusting levels). My previous use of other ortho films (as well as other slow films) gave me some idea of what to expect–or so I thought. I actually loaded the film under red safelight conditions in an attempt to get as many frames as possible from the roll, so as not to expose the start of the roll, pulling out enough film to secure the end to the take-up spool. The data sheet for Rollei Ortho 25 plus does state that "blue-green sensitivity allows the film to be handled under red darkroom lighting" but also under 'Laboratory Lighting': "The film can be processed in absolute darkness and should not be exposed to sunlight or darkroom lighting!" Presumably this refers to amber safelights rather than dark red. In the event, I got 39 frames on the 36-exposure roll, possibly not worth the extra effort.

After I developed the film and scanned the negatives, the results were more grainy than I had anticipated (for a 25 ISO film in comparison to other slow films I've used; clearly its nothing like a typical 400 ISO film). This may have been due to some overdevelopment and possibly some over-exposure (the grain is particularly prominent in the sky). Possibly some of this might be scanner noise, which I do find happens with dense negatives on my desktop scanner. I used Rodinal (as Ars Imago #9) to develop the film; possibly I should have used a higher dilution of 1+50 instead of 1+25 (the data sheet recommends Rollei Supergrain developer, not one I've ever used). Rodinal should work well with a slow film in theory: looking at other examples online, there does seem to be a range in terms of how fine the grain appears. Ideally, I'd like to print from the negatives in the darkroom, but my use of a darkroom for printing has somewhat been curtailed by the pandemic.

As most of the photographs were taken outside, often with a fair bit of sky in the frame, I did shoot a few frames with a yellow filter for comparison against those without (there was probably as much grey sky during the August of 2021 as there was blue). Generally, the sky has a 'soft' look to it, picking up more definition than I might have expected given the excess of blue light, but the use of a yellow filter does improve this: in the images below, the one with the filter really picks out the satellite dish against the darker sky on the distant building; at the same time it also makes some of the foliage lighter, with the tree in the middle of the frame appearing oddly washed out. I may have overcompensated in the exposure when using the yellow filter. I also feel the necessity of having a colour image here to really see exactly how the orthochromatic emulsion renders certain colours into tones.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - without filter

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - with yellow filter

Without a filter, bright summer clouds in a blue sky do begin to blend together,giving the soft look I described as in the example below. I would have liked to have tried more of a range of filters than I did: the data sheet lists yellow, orange, and red filters: to be listed, I imagine that a red filter would still transmit enough of the spectrum that the film is sensitive enough to record.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - no filter

Some of the frames with particularly localised areas of strong highlights appear to show some halation, as in the images below. This may be due to the Vito B's lens, although this isn't something I've really noticed before and the Color-Skopar on the camera is coated. This isn't an unpleasant artefact, but worth being aware of when shooting–in so much as it may be an effect to seek out. A comparison with shooting the film in a different camera with a more modern lens might be useful here, but outside the scope of this post. Incidentally, all the photographs I took with the film were handheld, mostly outside on bright days where the 25 ISO speed was not and issue–the interior shot below was quite well lit from the window.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

I didn't use the film for any portraits, so I can't specifically relate this use to part of what Ansel Adams writes about as regards portraiture. One subject that the film might be apt for could be architecture perhaps: rendering colour into equivalent tones may not be that necessary, and the slow speed of the film is less of a consideration than any potentially moving subjects. I did take a number of photographs which featured brickwork, and it would have been interesting to see how the ortho film rendered red bricks, but these are all yellow London stock bricks in the images below (in the third image, the wall of the house in the background is red brick though: the mortar stands out quite well against the bricks and just possibly this is enhanced by being rendered by orthographic film). 

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

From using a single roll of Rollei Ortho 25 plus, I don't feel as though I've sufficiently tested the films capabilities: it would be useful to compare the results with the same subjects shot with panchromatic film, to try different developers, experiment more with filters, and print from the negatives, rather than simply scanning from them, as is the case with this post. It would be interesting to compare it to Ilford Ortho Plus too, a slightly faster orthographic film. Rollei Ortho 25 plus is also available in both medium format rollfilm and large format sheet film (according to the data sheet, in 4x5, 5x7, and 8x10 inch sizes) and I can imagine that it would be worth trying the film out in other sizes as well as the other approaches outlined above.

Sources/further reading
Rollei Ortho 25 plus data sheet (PDF)
Rollei Ortho 25 plus on Film Photography London
Rollei Ortho 25 plus on Blue Moon Camera Codex
Rollei Ortho 25 plus Alex Luyckx Blog
Ansel Adams, The Camera, Little, Brown and Company, New York 1980, twelfth paperback printing, 2005.

Some large format glass plates

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch glass plate

In my posts about the ongoing glass plate night photography project, I've written about how some sizes are more common than others. Of all the relatively standard formats, 4x5 inches appear less frequently than quarterplate or the small metric and imperial sizes: in the past year I have only acquired two boxes in this size since using up the box of Air Ministry plates.

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic Dry Plates

The first of these are Wratten and Wainwright Metallographic Dry Plates. Wratten and Wainwright were a British company bought by Eastman Kodak in 1912 (a few years earlier, Eastman Kodak had made approaches to buy or merge with Ilford, presumably to gain larger market share in the UK). The Wratten name was used as a Kodak brand for many years afterwards, notably for filters and safelights, as demonstrated by the instructions at the top of the box. The Art Nouveau typeface used on the box label suggested that the plates were old, as did the explicit use of the phrase 'Dry Plates'; dry plates had been around since the last quarter of the 19th century and superseded the wet plate process, such that it quickly became reasonable to assume that photographic plates were all of the dry variety, and none of the many other boxes of plates I've collected and used are described as 'dry plates'; indeed, even at the time one would never have found boxes of wet plates as a commodity, as the wet plate process required the photographer to coat a sheet of glass and then expose this in the camera before the emulsion had time to dry. The development of the dry photographic plate itself allowed the emergence of companies such as Eastman and Ilford to supply material to photographers, taking the step of preparing a light sensitive surface away from the photographer and into the business of mass production (however, as there are contemporary photographers who have revived the wet plate process prominently enough, when I mention shooting with glass plates, this becomes an occasional misunderstanding). The reverse of the card inside the box has the numbers '5/35' at the bottom, which may be a date of printing. I have used a later version of Metallographic plates before with some success.

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plate test

The test shot shows the Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plates to be heavily fogged at the edges, but clear in the central portion. I did shoot a couple of these plates at night, but I was disappointed with the impenetrable fog around the edges of the plates. I had previously achieved some good images from the box of Air Ministry plates which were of a similar age, but as I have found as a very general rule, Kodak plates on the whole have tended not to age as well as Ilford plates; most of the glass plates I've used over the last couple of years have been either Kodak or Ilford, and I tend not to buy Kodak plates now unless in a rare size such as 4x5 inches (I do not have any information as to which manufacturer supplied the Air Ministry plates).

Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic glass plate

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plates

Around the same time I also bought an unopened box of Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plates. These had a leaflet inside which was dated to 1951. The wrapper around the box has two different styles of label: on the side, the narrow label is a newer design, with Ilford written in a sans serif font. Like the Wratten and Wainwright plates, Selochrome is also orthochromatic (a panchromatic version of Selochrome was later made, at least as a roll film by Ilford, which I used on the last 127 Day). The Ilford Manual of Photography describe Selochrome as "a fast plate for general purposes. Of average contrast. Fine grain and highly orthochromatic." I shot a test at the same time as the Metallographic plate. The result below looks relatively high in contrast, but this is in part due to the image being scanned from a contact print. The plates have aged quite well, with a few spotting marks, appearing on some plates more than others. The image at the top of this post is the best example of a photograph shot on these plates. I also shot the same scene on one of the Wratten & Wainwright Metallographic plates for comparison.

Ilford Selochrome plate test

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plate

Ilford Selochrome 4x5 inch plate

As well as 4x5 inch plates, I am also including in this post 9x12cm plates. As mentioned in my post on the Ica Trona 210, 9x12cm usually qualifies for large format. Last year, I wrote about finding three previously opened boxes of 9x12cm plates, which I got a few good results from two of the boxes. Earlier this year, I bought a job lot of three boxes of Ilford HP3, all previously unopened.

Ilford HP3 9x12cm glass plates

I could see from the box style before bidding on the lot that these were possibly late 1960s or early 70s. When the boxes arrived, one was not sealed, but was full; I opened one of the other boxes to find the leaflet inside. This was dated to 1973, just two years from the end of plate manufacture at Ilford. What the leaflet shows is just how many different types of plates (eight) were still being made at that late date. HP4 was introduced in 1966, but was made alongside HP3, and did not replace it for a number of years according to Photomemorabilia's Ilford Chronology, possibly HP3 as a plate emulsion was continued until glass plate manufacture ceased, and HP4 is not listed on the leaflet from the box. At this late date the HP name is also given in full: Hypersensitive Panchromatic. The boxes also contained 36 plates each - all previous boxes of photographic plates I've used contained, at least originally, one dozen (except for one half-dozen box). I suspect that at this stage it was uneconomical to sell plates in smaller amounts.

Ilford HP3 plate test

The test above shows that the plates are quite low in contrast, but there is little age deterioration beyond a loss in sensitivity. I rated the plate at 40 EI with three successive exposures, giving effective exposures of 40, 20 and 10. I shot some of the HP3 plates at night with my Voigtländer Avus where the low contrast was an advantage, but having three boxes of 36 plates, I was happy to divert some of the plates from my night photography project, and shot some with the Ica Trona handheld, rated 50, which I used to illustrated my post on the camera.

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot with Voigtländer Avus

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot with Voigtländer Avus

Ilford HP3 9x12cm plate, shot handheld with Ica Trona 210

Sources/further reading
Company details from Early Photography
Ilford Chronology on Photomemorabilia