Grain, Glorious Grain! – T-Max 3200 pushed to 6400

Ever since I started photography, when digital was not even a dream, I always love the effect of film grain. It always felt as if it was made by an artist, albeit a chemical one. For me, the idea of registering light with a completely chemical and analog medium always attracted me.

In digital, there is no grain, there are pixels but contrary to film, the aim of digital always been to achieve complete precision, thus the race to more and more pixels. To a point where we now have cameras that can print 24×36 images without any noticeable pixels, unless you press you nose to the print.

In modern film photography, we have multiple choices. You can choose to use very defined and low ISO films or you can choose to go all in and push for grain! For my very basic experiment, I decided to use T-Max P3200 and push it to 6400 ISO. Since this is too bright for the little Leica CL to use in daylight, I chose to shoot at night. While shooting at night, why not go after a light shower, like they do in movies!

While preparing for the shoot, I asked my teenaged girl if she was interested in coming with me. She is trying to learn photography and so we chose the perfect evening and went to our old downtown Québec City and walk around for a couple of hours. The sights were great as usual and this is what we captured. Well, I captured on film while she did ont digital. The film experiment for her is for another story.

As for the material used, it is a simple setup. I used a Leica CL and one of those lenses, Voigtlander 21mm f4, 40mm 1.4 or Leica 90mm f4 collapsable. I describe those since people are curious but in all honesty, it does not have any importance.

The same goes for the development, I simply done the standard recommended development from Kodak data sheet and D-76. All done manually in a standard Paterson tank. Shake for 30 seconds, wait and then 10s every minutes, you know the drill. The point was to not do anything special and thus not trying to have the finest grain possible. I say D-76 but I admit I used Ilford chemicals since they are more readily available, so ID-11 and the rest of the bunch.

Shooting with my teenager was great! Trying to teach photography with a digital camera is not easy! There are too much controls! I never noticed it before. Since I have been shooting since about 1987, the transition to digital has been quite easy. I learned from plenty of failures during my years of experiments but for my girl, learning with all the complexities of modern cameras (she uses my old Nikon D610) can get quite overwhelming. That is why, after a couple of tries, she asked me to try film for real, with my even older Nikon FE (I just absolutely love that camera!)

So, the film training will have to wait, but, wait a minute! I have been putting writing this article for so long that she already had the chance to shoot a film, completely manual, and even develop it herself! But this is a story for another time!

In the mean time, I am quite please with the way the pictures turned out! I even enlarged one to 16×20 and it looks so good. Grainy, but this is what I love! Hint, it is the first one.

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