I found a couple rolls of Ferrania P30 in my refrigerator donated by a generous friend. I decided to give it another go after looking at my first experience with this slow, high-contrast, fine-grain film. The first time I shot this film was in a camera with which I was unfamiliar; I didn't know what to make of the results. Taking a second look, I decided the stuff looked promising. I loaded the film in my 1955 FED 1g, a Leica clone from the Soviet era.
There is nothing actually wrong with the 1g. The issue is the difference in the height of the modern film cartridges from the height of the reloadable cassettes designed for the FED 1g and similar FED and Zorki cameras from the same era. My solution up to now has been to lay a penny on top of the film cassette to compensate for the lesser height of the modern film cassettes. As the current experience demonstrates, this is not the ideal solution.
So, I disassembled the camera in order to clean out the chewed up film bits. I wiggled the advance mechanism a bit to get it turning again and lubricated the advance gear train with some light oil. That got things working pretty smoothly, so I reassembled the camera and looked for a better way to align the film in the camera. What I came up with was a plastic washer the same diameter as the film cassette and about the right thickness to to hold the film cassette down to allow the film to travel through the camera without jumping off the sprockets.
I've got one more roll of P30. I'll load it up in the 1g and try shooting a stop faster to see if I get better highlight and shadow detail.
6 comments:
Nice fine grain and very pleasing tones! I like the look of this film!
Oddly enough I was looking at Rick Drawbridge's work this morning and noted quite a resemblance in tonal values of P30 to Ilford Delta 400. So, a bit of a mystery that involves the film's character and the proper combination of exposure and processing. Of course, given infinite time and enough monkeys it could be figrued out. Since I only have one roll of the stuff left I'll have to opt for the alternate strategy of winning the lottery.
I walked into Blue Moon Camera in Portland a couple of years ago and they had this stuff available to buy right off the shelf. I passed on it at the time and haven't seen it since. It looks like you can get some nice tones out of it, though, as well as holding in shadow/highlight detail.
Blue Moon is a great resource for the photographic community in Portland and beyond.
Mike, you are brave to disassemble your little 1g camera. Were there no shims under the lens mount custom fitted to make sure that the lens was parallel and exactly the right distance to the film gate? Maybe the Soviet cameras did not do this type of custom optical alignment?
I believe the dark horseshoe-shaped piece under the silver lens mount is the shim. I've had the FED 1g apart several times and it seems to be working ok in regard to focusing. I'm presently shooting a roll of P30 to test if the plastic washer on top of the film cartridge will cause the film to be properly aligned when advanced.
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