Some Night Time Shooting with Ilford FP4+

A couple of weeks ago I went out on a night-time photo walk in downtown Roanoke with the Exposure.Roanoke group. It was my first time shooting FP4+ at night and with it being a traditional grain film, reciprocity failure is to be expected.

I didn’t want to bet an entire photography outing on guesswork, so did a lot of hunting around for reciprocity charts. I don’t entirely trust the official Ilford ones, to be honest. It seems a mite suspicious that they show identical charts for all their films, even the modern “core shell technology” Delta line which should have much better reciprocity characteristics.

I had a great set of reciprocity data for HP5+, found in an old Photo Techniques article by Howard Bond, but it did not include any figures for FP4+. Eventually, after much searching, I found a chart online with data for several films and which closely matched the HP5+ figures which I knew to be reliable.

reciprocity-chart

I must confess I can’t remember where I found this, and I didn’t note it down. It was on one of the forums, possibly the Rangefinder Forum or Large Format Forums. Since I’m mostly sticking to traditional grain type Ilford films (Pan F+, FP4+, HP5+) I printed those columns, sized to tape onto the back of my Luna Pro F meter. I exposed at EI100 using the 30 degree reflective averaging metering method. Development was in D76 1:1.5, using the official box speed time for this film in D76 1:1 and inverting once every 30 seconds.

The gallery below shows quick (no spotting done) film scans from the roll.

I’ll be interested to see how they print, but the scans certainly look promising.