I’ve been away for a week on the Isle of Wight and while there, finished off my supply of bulk loaded Ilford Delta 100. I’ve now got catch up to do with developing and scanning! I seem to be getting good results with that in FX21. Next to use, is a bulk load of Foma 200. I’ve used this film before and liked it.
When I purchased this roll it was well in date and a bargain! It’s now 3 years out-of-date, but I’m not bothered by that at all – it will be fine! I went for the 100ft (or 30.5m if you prefer) – or did I?
A couple of days ago I set up my bulk loading set up. First of all spent 20 minutes trying to remember where I’d put the bulk loader. A safe place obviously! 1 inch strips of 2 inch wide brown parcel tape, lined up on the edge of the coffee table, and a collection of 17 once used, 35mm cassettes. This time I made sure to have DX coded 200 ISO ones, mostly old Kodak Gold. Most of my cameras I manually set the film speed but not all, and I have a couple that I cannot set! I didn’t bother with this with the Delta, it was no problem I just had to set it manually in the EOS. Remembering to do so is the Hassle!
All loaded up and ready to go. I attach the exposed end of the film onto the tiny bit of film left poking out of the cassette with the brown parcel tape, basically making a “hand made splice”. I know people say you should never use used cassettes, and brown parcel tape isn’t sufficient in strength. All I can say is – I’ve never had a problem and it works fine for me! According to my calculations I should get 17 rolls of 36 and a bit left over – usually a 20ish exposure for a bit of a test. Once I’m actually loading film, my loader clicks for every frame, so I just sit there counting under my breath, the give four more “clicks” for leader, lock the loader (make it light tight) and open it up, cut off the roll – repeat.
This time however I seem to have gotten 20 36exp rolls and a 24 exp test roll – so unless my loaders “clicking” mechanism has gone up-the-creek or my counting, this roll would seem to have been much longer than 100ft. A quick Ai Google search suggests this is not unusual.
So I now have a bag of 20 36 exp Foma 200’s to get through. I’m looking forward to trying it with FX21 developer, FX55 and Rodinal Stand. I used a roll of Foma 100 with Rodinal and got a lovely set of negs – so I’m interested to see how the 200 fares.
The final “discovery” is that I’ve occasionally seen Foma 200 (Creative) advertised as a T grain film. I always doubted this as neither the 100 (Classic) or 400 (Action) claim to be. I downloaded the 200 Datasheet and indeed it is!
Current prices are in the UK are about £65 including postage for a 30.5m length, so if you get 20 rolls that’s £3:25 a roll for a T grain film! Film photography is so cheap!! 🙂
S.H.O.U.T. 