On how black and white film is beautiful

The other morning I’d pulled out a roll of Kentmere 400 with the intention of loading it in the Zorki and taking it for a walk. And then somewhere along the way that roll of film ended up in the Leica because loading the Zorki seemed like a pain (it is kind of annoying, like loading Barnack Leicas, but it’s also really not that bad). It might also be because I like the option to put the Zeiss or the Leica Elmar on the front of the M4-2 and not have to think about whether or not the Industar on the Zorki is going to pull off the images in the way I’m looking for it to without flaring like mad or introducing weird distortions, etc.. Either way, I ended up taking a walk with the Leica on a late sunny morning.

I shot the film at box speed but overexposed it by about a stop most of the time so it was kind of like shooting it at 200. I developed it at box speed in Ilfotec HC 1+31. I’d been waxing nostalgic about how beautiful black and white film is specifically when it comes to black and white work and the end results here kind of indicate that it’s not purely nostalgia or staring at my catalog of scans for too long. It does just look really nice. There’s a certain subtlety of tones in black and white film that’s really hard to get right on digital black and white for some reason. The sensor on the M262 can pull it off well enough especially when shooting a low contrast old lens like the Elmar 50/2.8. But on a lot of digital cameras it seems to take a lot of finagling to massage the tones to get anywhere close to as beautiful and nuanced as film.

I think it’s also telling that I have 10 rolls of color film in my fridge and when I grabbed some film to shoot a film camera again I grabbed the black and white film… I think it says more about my trepidation about getting everything set up for the C41 development, if I’m honest. I’ll get there eventually, I think… But for now it was nice to shoot some black and white and remember the beauty of good old black and white film.