Roll Number 9: Ferrania P30 in Manhattan

Sep 4

A view of Manhattan from the top of the Empire State Building.

I’m going to start something new. New medium, new processes, new story format. This is the first in what will hopefully be a long-term ongoing thread of updates here. After some consideration, and more likely just the natural progression of falling off the cliff at full speed into wherever the photography journey takes me, I am now self-developing black-and-white film. I actually enjoyed the process more than what I anticipated. The feeling of taking that first roll of film off the reel to hang and dry and seeing the first images I captured and developed myself was priceless. I’m hooked.

But it presented itself as an opportunity. Each roll of film is its own chapter in a journey and a story. Lessons learned, mistakes made, and pleasant surprises. This will be my first installment of this series. Roll number nine. Why nine? Well, my first 8 rolls of film were part of my trip to Greece earlier this summer. Nine it is. Roll nine is a roll of Ferrania P30 film that I actually acquired while in Athens at a local photography store, Skiadopoulos Ltd. I went there to see if there were any good finds and left with a nearly impossible-to-find stash of Leica Monopan 50 and three rolls of Ferrania film the owner convinced me to try after giving me a demonstration of the high contrast classic Italian cinema film. Good people, good stories, and they liked the M3 and Summaron 35 hanging from my neck.

A planned weekend trip to New York for the bat mitzvah of a family friend's daughter, with a scheduled day in Manhattan, presented a good opportunity to try this film stock out. This set of images is also a first set with a new-to-me lens, a 1960 Leica 50mm Summilux version 1. There will be more on this lens later.

Ferrania P30 did what I was hoping it would do - Sharp, high-contrast black-and-white images. I believe this roll is from the early production runs, which are known to be pretty unforgiving and blow out highlights. A couple of these shots do just that, but I kind of like the look. I purchased three more rolls from B&H Photo, appearing to be the newer batch with more forgiving contrast curves.

All images were developed with Adox XT3 developer using the Massive Dev Chart app, then scanned into Capture One with my Leica SL2-S and Sigma 100mm DG DN Macro lens. This workflow has proven to be very consistent and fast. I think the results speak for themselves.

Enough rambling; enjoy the photos (click for full screen images).