Shooting Film – Kodak Plus-X

Just a real quick post on my long overdue shooting film series, since I have been so big on shooting an M series film camera prior to taking the $9000 plunge for an M9 and meager Leica lens. Here is an old favorite of mine, always appropriate, renders skin tones well – a little too blue sensitive but hey that is what yellow filters were made for. Good ol’ Kodak Plus-X Pan.

This example happens to have been developed in Kodak XTOL, a wunder-developer of the moment a decade and a half ago. To tell you the truth, after extensive testing I never really warmed up to it. I had gigantic consistency issues with XTOL from batch to batch. Saw negligible shadow speed improvements, and nothing really special at all compared to regular old Kodak D-76. Oh the developer was “non-toxic” but who cares.

Plus-X on the other hand was a “nice” film. I really did not shoot it in smaller formats much as I actually prefer Tri-X so so much more for a million reasons. Here is a pixel for pixel view of Plus-X from a 4000 dpi scan with no hocus-pocus so you can see the structure of the film. At normal enlargements (not the microscopic view you see here) it was very smoooooth but still had a little bite to it.

Just for comparison sake here is the same pixel for pixel view of Kodak Tri-X at 4000 dpi – this one was developed in PMK Pyro – a supposedly much “grainier” developer. See why Tri-X is my desert island film? I love that stuff, not nearly as “sharp” as some other finer, slower films but hey I am not a landscape photographer trying to see detail in tree leaves 14 miles away on a small format camera.

Here is the full Tri-X image

RB