Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Any experience with C-41 process B&W? I read one post on either APUG or RF forums that the overall tonality is more natural ie. no need for a yellow filter, thus if that is what you want, no filter factor to effectively slow down your film speed. Aside from this and it is a bit more expensive is there anything else compaired to other 400 ASA B&W films. Processing is not an issue as anything I am serious about gets processed at TIW. I have also heard that C-41 B&W scans better on flatbeads, I believe I got this off the Scanning Tips 101 site.

It does scan great. You can use Digital Ice with the negs as you scan to get rid of dust and scratches, so that's a huge time saver vs traditional bw film.

It has great exposure latitude as well. I generally rate is at 320. Some rate rate at 200 for better tonality. I've even shot it at EI 25 and got a usable frame:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/burlapjacket/2181600603/" title="Mary, Mary... Why Ya Buggin? by Burlap Jacket, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2276/2181600603_3e993f798a.jpg" width="332" height="500" alt="Mary, Mary... Why Ya Buggin?"></a>

Doesn't do as well with underexposure though (as is the case with most negative films).

It can be very contrasty with deep blacks.

Thanks Burlap, I clicked on your photo a then the link in the caption to your photo on Flickr for the discussion of C&W chromogenic film. When I am in the States in a couple of weeks I will pickup a batch of both Kodak and Ilford films perhaps 20 rolls of each. Before I read that discussion I was going to just pickup Kodak.

Chromogenic B&W is great for convenience and offers smooth tonality with little grain, however if you intend to make prints from the negatives using a traditional enlarger, stick with traditional B&W film (chromo B&W is much more difficult to focus using a grain focusing device).

Thanks for your input Ken, in my case it will be scanned. Also in the link I mention above in some circumstances it is useful to scan the neg as a positive then flip it in software, then doing the levels and curves as needed. This gives alot of room for experimentation. When scanning colour negs I feel the software is taking some of the control out of my hands and automating to much of the process. By positive scanning and flipping later it should be posible to get some of that control back. Of course this would be true whether scanning regular b&w or chromogenic.