Microfilm, Motion Picture Film, and the Pentax H3V

About six months ago I won a 2,000-foot spool of Kodak 2383 on eBay. The film, however,  lacks any edge information, so I can't verify that it is 2383. It matches Kodak's description of the film's physical appearance quite well, though. The ISO is 1.6., which means that at f16 on a sunny day it needs a 1.6-second exposure. In bright light at f1.8, the shutter speed is around 1/30th of a second. At f2.8, 1/8th. That makes hand-holding the camera pretty difficult with this film.

But it yields a vintage look with nice grain. One limitation of this film, it has light damage, so the film HAS to be used in bright light or the images are unusable. Here is what an image taken in low light looks like:


What you're seeing along the edge is light damage caused by a pinhole leak in the film tin. The light has leaked in between the film's perforations. However, in bright light the new image wipes out the existing damage. Here's an example:


Fortunately, I lucked out and wound the film so that the light damage is along the top in the final images.

In addition to this microfilm, I also took some Kodak 250D with with me. 250D is a motion picture film that lends itself particularly well to monochrome work. The gray tones, when exposed correctly, are quite nice. Now, let me be clear that the images from the 250D roll were not exposed correctly. In fact, I only know how to expose the microfilm correctly because I accidentally screwed up the camera's settings. I thought the shutter speed indicator aligned with the cocked indicator, causing all my microfilm images to be perfectly exposed and all my 250D images to be MASSIVELY overexposed. It's complicated, just trust me. So here are some images from the microfilm roll.














You can see the vintage, high-contrast look. It's a nice film for selected uses, but not for action photography.

The 250 D results were less evenly toned and tended to all be high-key. In fact, only two of the 250D shots turned out at all.

Adaptable does not Equal Pairable

Pairing my first SLR with my Dad's old Mamiya/Sekor DTL 1000 kit lens -- a 55mm 1:1.7 -- seemed a great pairing. With the M42 adapter, it ought to work brilliantly on the K1000 and deliver high-quality images. However, that wasn't exactly the case across the board and while a few images turned out, most of the roll was not well exposed. The K1000 has through-the-lens metering, and the shots which turned out were generally shot at f1.7. So I suspect that when I tried stopping down, the meter compensated for the available light versus what aperture it THOUGHT I would use, and provided an incorrect reading. That said, the shots that turned out show why Ilford P4 is a superb film for cameras.


1/125th, f16. This was the one shot on the roll that turned out well not wide-open. That's mostly because I calculated the exposure myself and didn't trust the camera. I should have done that for all of them.


The P4 film had some problems with black. I took some shots of the 4th Street bridge to see if the P4 would render black as it does above, or in a more silver manner as it does with my dogs' fur. As shown in the first image, this film can be a very-high-contrast performer with good tonal range, and in the first shot it is. This indicates that this film works best with subject that present a large tonal scale.


1/1,000th, f1.8. The kissing couple was back so I decided to go for a better shot of them. Wide open, this lens is very soft at infinity. In this shot, that provides a fairly nice result.