Film Photography

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Accidentally wound up with Ilford Delta ISO 3200 film. Can I use it, or should I return it? (lem.monster)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have recently started getting into film photography and I'm still learning the ropes. After buying a variety of color and black and white films to experiment with, I noticed that I somehow accidentally bought a couple of rolls of very high speed Ilford Delta ISO 3200 film. At this point, all I have is a Kodak Ektar H35N and an Olympus Pen-EES 2 which has a max ISO of 400. Is the Ilford film useless to me, or can it be used at lower speeds in certain conditions?

EDIT: This is tangential, but I was originally going to ask this question on Reddit instead of Lemmy because the conventional wisdom is that Lemmy isn't useful yet for more niche topics, but I thought "why not try Lemmy first anyway," and I'm glad I did. I found the most active film photography community on Lemmyverse.net (which hadn't yet even federated to my small instance) and it paid off. How nice!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can pull the film to ISO 400. Make sure you can find times for your developer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

With black and white, I'm actually interested in doing the development myself. So once I'm comfortable doing it by the numbers I'll probably give that a shot. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Delta 3200 has long been regarded as an ISO 800 film that does well when pushed to 3200. You’ll be fine shooting it at 400 and, if properly developed, should yield some fine grain.

Head over to the Massive Dev Chart and find the times for your preferred developer + ISO combo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

That's a great resource I was unaware of! Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You could experiment with astrophotography, maybe try and catch some star trails with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's something I hadn't considered. I'll look into it. My naive expectation is that I would need better optics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Beware long exposure times. Rated ISO will drop (sometimes drastically) for exposures longer than 1 s.