ilford Ortho Plus 80 – tim dobbs photography

I have shot ilford Ortho plus in 120 format before and really loved how it looks.

Sharp as a tack and very little grain with great dynamic range.

This roll that I shot in my Mamiya RB67 over Christmas was a total accident.

I received a few rolls of film from my better half as a present as usual namely a few different Lomography films in 35mm and 120 format one of which I have never shot before … Lady Grey 400

My plan was to take out the RB67 and for some reason I thought the Lady Grey was in 120 format so when I went to get it out of the fridge I realised it was 35mm so a little disappointed and not wanting to take out an SLR I grabbed the roll next to it which was the Ortho.

Problem was it was in my mind I was going to shoot 400 iso film so I set my meter to 400 before getting the film so obviously when I swapped to the Ortho I forgot to change the light meter and went out on our little walk happily shooting away thinking I had 400 loaded.

When I got home and unloaded the roll I immediately realised my mistake and promptly jumped on the interwebs looking for any info I could find about developing times for Ortho plus when pushed to 400.

I could not seem to find out much as obviously there was no one as dull as me and made this error so after a few twitter chats I decided to process in Rodinal 1+100 dilution Stand development for 1 1/2 hours with 2 inversions( I rotated with stick actually) at start then every 30 minutes and crossed my fingers that something was salvageable.

To my surprise then I opened the tank the negatives looked perfect so I hung them ups and waited to dry.

After scanning the only slight problem that I noticed was some of the highlights had blown just a little bit which must have been down to the stand development most probably (this was my 1st time trying this method).

The highlights blowing didn’t really bother me and the sharpness and reasonable grain surprised me.

I would not recommend doing this everyday as I feel I was pretty lucky this time but it was an interesting experiment (accident) and shows just how good ilford Ortho Plus is.

Anyway here is the whole roll .. click to view larger

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I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek

When ilford were teasing about something new coming to the film photography market a while back I was eager to find out what it could be …

When they announced Ortho Plus 80 I was excited to try it out as I have never used Orthochromatic film before.

Just incase you don’t know what Ortho film is here is a little snippet from ilford….

“ILFORD ORTHO PLUS is an orthochromatic black and white film. Designed as a high-resolution copy film for negatives, ORTHO PLUS offers superb photographic potential thanks to its fine grain and sharpness.

Ideally suited for landscape photography, the blue and green sensitivity of this emulsion enables the film to be handled in deep red* safelight conditions making processing and inspection easier.

Its lack of red sensitivity also means that reds and oranges in your frame are rendered darker with stronger contrast than standard panchromatic films (all other ILFORD and Kentmere films are panchromatic).”

So over christmas I went out over 2 days trying to shoot a range of subjects to see how it performed … I used my Nikon F100 and 50mm f1.4 and developed it using ilfotecHC 1+31 dilution for 6 minutes.

I was really impressed with the images … lovely fine grain, great tonal range and really sharp.

If this was a bit faster than 80 it would challenge my love for HP5+ as my goto B&W film.

I have a roll of 120 to try next and may put it through my Fuji GW690iii to see how much resolution the lovely film stock will produce.

So here is most of the roll as I have omitted some frames as they were duplicates due to bracketing some images.

Please click a photo to view larger