FOMAPAN 200

I am going to like Fomapan 200 once I get its peculiarities figured out.  One of the attractions of the film is the ISO200 rating which potentially provides more flexibility in responding to lighting levels than the Kentmere 100 that I have been using lately.  I started off this first roll at our favorite local craft brewery.

I shot the Fomapan 200 at a stop less than the box speed with the idea that I would be processing it in PMK Pyro which with Kentmere requires a shooting speed reduction of around a stop.  I did not find any very good guidance on line for the Fomapan/PMK combination, so I took a stab at it with 9 minutes at 23C in PMK 1+2+100.

I was very pleased with the Fomapan's fine grain which compares favorably with the slower Kentmere film.  However, most of the outdoor sunny day shots did not achieve my goal regarding tonal depth.  Sorting out the many influences on that quality involves many elements including the camera, lens, exposure and processing.

• The Nikon EM appears to be operating well, but there is a faint flare spot appearing intermittently in the images which indicates a probable need for a light seal replacement.
• The 28mm Rokunar lens has good resolution, but the wide-angle often captures a bit too much of the bright sky.
• Giving the film a full extra stop of exposure may have been a bit too much to retain good detail in both shadows and highlights on a bright day.
• My guessed-at time and temperature for the PMK processing may have significantly  missed the mark.

I am encouraged to experiment a bit with this film because of the many good results I have seen posted on line in the Fomapan 200 Creative Flickr Group.  The film seems to respond well to processing with a great variety of developers including a couple of my favorites, Rodinal and HC-110.  There are also poor to awful results posted in the same place and some naysayers.  My feeling is that the people who denigrate the film have just not taken the time to work through issues of exposure and processing.  It is instructive to examine recommendations for processing times and temps suggested by the Massive Dev Chart site for a variety of films using HC-110B:

Film	Devel	Dil	ASA/ISO	35mm	120	Sheet	Temp

Fomapan 200

HC-110

B

200

3.5

3.5

3.5

20C

Ilford SFX 200

HC-110

B

200

9

9

20C

Kodak TMax 100

HC-110

B

200

7

7

7.5

20C

So, the very short time recommended for Fomapan clearly shows a significant difference in the film's chemistry.  Most people including me would be reluctant to use times under 5 minutes, but the option to use HC-110 dilution H at twice the B dilution gets around that issue.

On the way to Zuzax

I installed a new beam-splitter mirror in my Leica IIIa with hopes that would enhance the brightness of the viewfinder.  The operation went pretty smoothly thanks to some good on line instructions.  Aside from adding a slight yellow tint to the rangefinder spot, there was little improvement. So, the view through the Leica is still about on a par with that in most of my other old rangefinder cameras.  Fortunately, my surgically enhanced vision makes using any of them more practical.  After slightly readjusting the camera's rangefinder I took it for a photo walk into Old Town.  Mounted on the Leica was the collapsible Industar 22.  The film was Tri-X rated at ASA 200 in anticipation of PMK Pyro processing.

I found the nice old Chevy Wagon parked in front of the church in the Plaza Vieja.  It was one I had not seen before and it looked like it just came off the showroom floor.  Since there is always some nice light in the Museum's sculpture garden I stopped off there too, as I always do when testing any new gear or techniques.

The next day I decided to stick with the vehicle theme and made a short road trip East on I-40.  Leaving Albuquerque, the frontage road is actually a long stretch of  the old Route 66 highway.  There is a big collection of unrestored cars and trucks on the South side of the highway which I have gone by many times, and I decided the time had come to pay it a visit.  This time, I mounted the 35mm Jupiter 12 on the Leica along with the accessory viewfinder.

The yard full of old trucks and cars is on a dead-end off the old highway between Tijeras and Zuzax.  It turns out to be attached to a well regarded East Mountain repair shop, Charlie's Fleet Service.  Charlie and his dogs greeted me at his front door; he said I was welcome to make some pictures so long as I did not open any doors or hoods. 

Part of my plan for the day was to compare Tri-X in PMK with HC-110 semi-stand processing.  After finishing off the roll in the Leica I shot a roll of Tri-X at box speed in the Nikon FE.  The Nikon Series E 50mm and the Rokunar 28mm performed nicely,  but Fate's fickle finger poked a hole in my strategy.

After an hour in the highly dilute HC-110, I fixed and washed the Tri-X from the Nikon.  When I pulled the film off the reel I was dismayed to see that it was a nearly opaque gray color with the images barely discernible.  It looked like a problem with the fixer, so I stuffed the strip of film back in the tank and soaked it for another ten minutes.  The gray was cleared and the negatives looked normal when I took them from the tank again.  I don't know if I just misjudged the time, or if the fixer was near exhaustion.  So, I got some reasonably good pictures from the Nikon after all, but the comparison test was mooted.

Still, a good day.

New eyes on new gear

I picked up the Nikon EM at a yard sale for ten bucks a while back.  The camera worked ok, but I didn't like the Tokina zoom lens it came with so I set the camera aside after shooting just a roll or two of film.

The Tokina zoom made nice enough images, but the f3.5 maximum aperture coupled with the zoom feature seemed to create a problem with the viewfinder's focusing spot; it tended to black out if the eye was not positioned just right.  The problem was less noticeable when zoomed back to 35 or 50mm.  That got me thinking that I would be better off with some kind of prime lens.  So, I started looking around for a Series E Nikon lens that came standard on the EM.  One turned up recently on the local Craigslist at a price of $30, so I met the seller in a McDonald's parking lot to get the Nikon prime.

The Nikon Series E 50mm 1.8 lens made the Nikon EM into a nicely compact and rather light-weight system.  The images from the lens were unsurprisingly sharp and undistorted.  I don't think the pictures are noticeably better than many of my other lenses on the Spotmatic or other cameras, including those with the older Tessar-type such as my Vito II or the Contessa.  I did find that having a bright view in the finder and a clear focus did encourage exploring more subjects in depth.

It turned out the guy I met at McDonald's had brought along several other Nikon-mount lenses.  The one that interested me was an Aetna Rokunar MC Auto f2.8 28mm for twenty bucks.  Well, why not?

I found a few derogatory comments about the lens on line later, but the results I got from it seemed excellent to me, comparable to the Nikon prime.  Also, the Rokunar gets me seamlessly close to macro with a minimum focal distance of less than a foot.

The meter on the EM reads a stop low, and some of the images show a small amount of shutter capping.  The camera is not particularly friendly to diy repairs and I doubt I will try to correct the small defects.  I like aperture-priority automation, though it would be nice to have the option to over-ride that at will.  Over-all I can't complain about the camera's performance in view of what I have invested so far.  I would like to try the lenses on another camera for the sake of comparison.  I may have to hunt down an old Nikon F body.  Darn.