New Roll / Film Review (Delta 3200) (Patreon)

Hello! This is my first time shooting this stock - it's Ilford Delta 3200, a massive departure from my normal stocks and styles. Here it is on Drive and Flickr.

The main reason I got this stuff was to shoot April's please (t)read with me event, a local trans-lit reading and art series my friend Aster Olsen organizes. (Info for the next one is here, for my fellow Seattlites)!)

I knew I'd be shooting photos in a mostly-darkened room, so I needed fast film, and Ilford's black-and-white stuff is usually cheaper than Kodak's and generally similar in quality (or at least not bad). It's my first roll of black-and-white in months and I think the fastest film stock I've ever shot with. I tried a bunch of stuff I don't usually do (so this roll is weaker than I prefer, but I was experimenting, and I had fun).

Interestingly, I actually think I liked it least with the photos of people. This film has a relatively large grain and it seems to have the least enjoyable midtones; it feels like the grain actually stands out most intrusively/roughly at 50%-70% gray. Since that's where generally where (lighter) skin tones are, especially for the darkened-room shots, I think it's a little too rough.

At night, I found its deeper blacks and bright whites more interesting.

I took this roll to Panda Labs for development (because I was too scared to ruin it, with event photos on here!) but they develop in Kodak XTol, which is generally considered a fine-grain developer, so I doubt I could have gotten better results with home dev.

In these dark ridiculous-contrast night shots, the grain is at least a cool attribute. In the event space with people, if I shot film no-flash indoors again, I'd probably pay the extra few dollars for Kodak TMax3200, which appears (from what I can see online) to have smoother grain and softer gradients in the skin-midtone range.

Where this stuff kicked insane ass, however? "Spy" shots. (This is a practice photo taken for my ongoing 36 Views project at Boeing Field.)

Any photograph that looked like I took it somewhere I shouldn't be—stopped all the way down to pinhole aperture, of course—looked like something taken on a spy camera. The shots take on an almost utilitarian quality in environments like this; beauty is secondary to simply capturing an image that reveals the entire environment as clearly as possible. I think it's why a shot as simple as the above feels so clandestine.

Nowhere was this clandestine, unusual look more apparent than at the very end of the roll, where I slapped on my 300mm Nikkor, stopped it all the way down, and shot photos of the city.

The 300mm Nikkor is a relatively utilitarian lens (low contrast, not ultra-sharp; I bought it for $70 four years ago at a shop in Orange County, so I can't complain) but with this film it looks correct. This looks like a shot I needed to take, and then leave; it is voyeuristic without having to intrude on a person's privacy.

I am kicking myself for only having taken three shots with this lens before I exhausted the roll. I'm almost certainly going to buy another roll of this stuff and shoot the entire thing through the 300mm.

I hope this is enjoyable or helpful for those of you choosing films for the summer!

Vicki <3