Regular customer and film photography aficionado Ryan Flatters Shares his experience working with and developing Fomapan 400 Active film. All text and photos courtesy of Ryan!!  Fomapan 400 is available here at Camera Trading Company.

All Text and photos by Ryan Flatters.

A colorful black and white experience

As spring arrives, I get excited about longer days and the chance to enjoy making images on fine grained, lower speed films. This is the season where I start planning outings with Ilford Pan F or an exotic low iso cinema stock. This year has been different. Since late winter I have been locked in a personal mission to get nice results from Fomapan 400. I assure you, I’m not here to unpack the source of this stubbornness. The classic approach to films and developers is to limit options. Find a couple stocks and developers and master them. Solid advice, but these days we no longer have this luxury. As film has made its comeback we have faced reformulations, shortages, geo-political issues and yes, price increases. We need to be quick to abandon an old favorite and adapt to something different. At least this is the rational explanation. The other explanation is that there are a lot of us film geeks that enjoy experimenting with new stocks. My daughter recognizes this as she offers me her empty kombucha bottles for my ‘experiments’.

Fomapan 400 is a scanner friendly film; both 35mm and 120 formats dry flat without cupping.

The 35mm film base is substantial, while the 120 format is more than sturdy enough for darkroom and scanner work.

Normally when trying a new film I hit the internet and get the lowdown from my favorite bloggers and YouTube personalities. These folks have put in a lot of legwork and get you pretty close to optimal results on your first couple rolls. Cross reference their findings to manufacturers data sheets and the Massive Dev Chart and you can lock in a recipe for developers you already have on your shelf. In short order you will get close to the look you are after. Insert juke box record scratch here! My method let me down with Fomapan 400 and I got seriously lost. Mark Mongeau at The Camera Trading Company saw me come in week after week to purchase a new roll of Foma 400 (in 120) in a quest to unlock the secret. He didn’t judge. I am not sure why I refused to let this go. Maybe it was the satisfying green antihalation dye that pours off the 120 rolls when developing….

Online lore is that the film has an ambitious box speed leading to blocked shadows and aggressive grain. My first results seemed to affirm this. It’s a look, but not what I was after.

Cutting back from 400 iso (box speed) to 200 iso helped with shadows, but I was still left with more grain than I prefer.My mojo started to come back when I switched to 35mm. It turned out that I had to go back to basics. I didn’t do a full Ansel Adams personal film speed test (not a densitometer in sight), but simply tried to be more methodical.I shot my roll of 35 mm Fomapan 400 by partially bracketing. That is, I shot the same frame at both 400 iso and 200 iso. I used the on-camera meter on my Nikon FE and verified periodically against my handheld meter. After shooting half the roll, I cut the film from my camera and developed it in D76 (stock) as this developer is considered to be ‘the’ benchmark.

400 iso in D76 (stock)Blocking in Shadows	200 iso in D76 (stock)Shadows opening up	200 iso in D76 (stock) More grain. Consider more than 1 stop compensation for yellow filter.

   

Fomapan 400-35mm in D76 (stock) 8min.

I continued with the final half roll, this time developing in Blazinal (Canadian Rodinal) 1:100 for 2 hours in semi-stand development. Semi-stand development can produce negatives that are well compensated. Shadows can open up without highlights getting blown. This was confirmed in this set of negatives as I had a hard time distinguishing between 400 and 200. My only complaint is the negatives seemed a touch dense (I can barely see though the exposed film leader). Next time, I might try 1 to 1.5 hours. Grain is there, but it’s pleasing. A nice classic look.

With this success under my belt, I loaded up my Rolleiflex 2.8E with yet another roll of 120. Again, I shot each frame at both 400 and 200 iso. To keep things simple, I did not use yellow or orange filters.

This time I developed in 510-Pyro 1:100 using semi-stand for 23 minutes (Massive Dev Chart). As a staining developer, it is advised to avoid acid stop bath and fixer. So far I have been getting away using acidic Ilford Rapid Fix. Until now! When I pulled the negatives from the tank, they were bright pink!

Semi-stand development in both Rodinal and 510-Pyro closed the gap between 400 and 200 iso. Still, my preference is to go below box speed. On my next go-round I will try shooting at 250 or 320 knowing that I can shoot at 400 if lighting conditions force me to. I did notice that images can still get grainy if light readings are off. This film is definitely not as forgiving as Ilford HP5, but I really like it's classic look. After what seemed like a hard fight, I’m left with the reminder that despite the wealth of online information, we should also follow our own, methodical path to understanding films. We can stumble upon green water and maybe even pink negatives as we experiment with our analogue hobby in an AI enhanced digital world.

Frame 36 ½……..end of the roll.

Thanks to Mark Mongeau at The Camera Trading Company for supplying the forum and film for this article. Fomapan films, Blazinal (Canadian Rodinal), Ilford ID11 (D76) are available for purchase at his online store at the link above and brick and mortar store in Perth, Ontario Canada.