A first roll of Polypan F50

Uncles at play. The best shot of the roll.

Polypan F50 is a mysterious beast : it is a film made to copy cinema movies. It has no anti halation layer: it means the light bounces back from the pressure plate of the camera and on highlights produce a “glow” effect (To reduce the glow you can put apply some black backing paper to the pressure plate).

Nice special “glow” and shades or grey

It comes in bulk of various lengths and can be found on auction sites, it looks it was produced until recently.  It can be pushed to 100 or 200 as some friends do, I may try on the next roll.

The girl in Wanzi.

This roll was shot with the Leica M4 + Summilux 50v2, at 50 ISO, hand metered (Sekonic 308S). I processed mine at my local lab which used Kodak D76, I was told the buy pushed it one stop.

Music Head

The result is quite OK to my taste, the grain is quite smooth in some of the shots, more present on others, like a generic 100 ISO film. There is something special on some shots that can be related to the “Glow”.

Egg Business

This is a 50 ISO film, so not so easy for street shooting, but still I think three out of four shots are OK technically. Using the Summilux gives a bit more leeway to play with compare to slower lens, and on a sunny day I could shoult at 1/125, 1/250

At the crossing

The film is moderately curly, scanning did not show any special difficulties. The highlight seems to be a bit blown, bringing them in line needs darkening the pictures a bit too much to my taste, but I cannot deny the palette of grey is interesting.

Edit with highlights “in line”

Original version

I though it was more interesting to share about this new experience that following up my last post about the art of curating  films. But I can quickly share the following: on the 25 shots of this roll, 5 where not good technically, 4 are of my family, 13 seriously lack of interest or are dupes. So I am left with the 8 shareable shots shown here

Time off

A bit high ratio, but I am a slow shooter, specially with a film of such slow speed, so maybe I paid more attention. The first and last shots are probably a bit above OK. “Music head” with its quirky composition is probably very close to  be an OK. The “Girl in Wanzi” would have been as well if not for some motion shake I think. “Bump”, “Egg Business” and the “Time Off” are on the very low end of the interesting range.

Some fools sell, some fools buy.

You can check the on the web;

• Polypan group on flickr:  https://www.flickr.com/groups/44223278@N00/
• Polypan in Caffenol : http://caffenol.blogspot.sg/2010/12/polypan-f-and-caffenol.html

 

Thanks for reading.

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