Lauded for its high contrast and cinematic capabilities, Ferrania's P30 immediately caught my attention. Resurrected from a renowned past, this film is based off its predecessors that were first released for still photography in the late 50s. While the original company closed down as digital photography took over, a small group of photographers bought the original factory and began releasing the film once more just a few years ago! How cool is that.
When my brother in law asked if I'd take some grad photos for him along with some shots of him and his girlfriend, I knew this would be a good time to try out P30 after saving it for a couple months. I had mostly seen P30 used for street photography and documentary work, but was really interested to see how it did with portraits and if the contrast would be too much? After telling him my idea for doing most of the photos on black and white film, he was all in. I would still take some digital photos just in case I botched the development (this would be my fifth b/w roll developed at home I think) but we were feeling confident.
Here's a selection of some of the shots from the day, all of which were shot using a Nikon FM and Nikkor-S Auto 55mm f/1.2 Non-AI:
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the images and how P30 handles. I also shot a roll of TMax 100 (an expired one at that, but you wouldn't know) and found the P30 to have the edge in terms of sharpness and how fine the grain was. As expected, the contrast was also greater than TMax. Too much in fact. When converting the scanned negatives, I usually will invert my tone curve, then set the black and white points right before the shadows and highlights clip. When I did this with P30, things just got out of hand. I found that the black and white points needed to be pulled back a bit in order to have a pleasing image.
After finding where I liked the contrast in each image, P30, in my opinion, simply sings. It's hard to say exactly how sharp the film is when also using a sharp lens (set anywhere between f/2 and f/5.6 in these shots), but zooming in on these images reveals a quality that I am quite happy with. It is in this zooming in, however, that you will also find my single complaint with P30.
Throughout all the images, there was a dark speckling that appeared. It is particularly evident in the highlights and midtones of the images, but the shadows have it too. In the image below, you can see it quite clearly:
No, there wasn't an overwhelming amount of mosquitos out that evening.
Ferrania advertises P30 as having a high silver content and I've seen talk online that some of this silver could remain on a negative during development, however, I developed the previously mentioned roll of TMax afterwards with the same chemicals (Flicfilm's B/W Kit) and did not have the same issue on those images. Ruling out the silver leads me to think that there was a manufacturing problem on the roll of P30 I had. I think the speckles we're seeing are actually very small holes in the emulsion itself...little pinpricks essentially.
As mentioned earlier, P30 is a recently made film with 2022 marking it's official release and the few years beforehand marking it's alpha testing period. I know little about manufacturing film but I imagine it's not an easy process and there's bound to be issues still cropping up as Ferrania continues to work out the kinks. Nonetheless, all of the images from this roll have this sort of speckling, degrading the quality unfortunately.
I haven't seen this on other images of P30 that I've looked through (though I haven't spent that much time searching for it either). I bought this roll from Cinestill, so perhaps they still had some rolls from an earlier batch than more current releases? All speculation. I've emailed Ferrania a week ago with a sampling of a few images for their thoughts but have yet to hear anything. Even with these speckles, I would shoot more rolls of P30 thinking that this wouldn't be an issue that is to be expected.
I really, really liked this film. I think the contrast is delightful, along with its sharpness and range of tonality. The fact that there was even more contrast available in my conversions if wanted is awesome. I purchased my roll via Cinestill for under $10 usd, which seemed like a good deal to me. In terms of Canadian options, I've seen McBain's in Edmonton carrying P30 but was shocked to see their price of $25 cad! A quick search online sees other distributors offering it for $20 cad, which still feels high but alas, no one consulted me about it.
