Foma Film

If you’ve been following my recent experimentation with Fomapan 400 you will have seen my results so far from a +2 push (EI1600), as well as from 1 stop overexposed (EI200). The images made with that extra stop of light were enough to allow me to “settle” for shooting with that as my standard while in India, but on returning to London’s grey skies I found myself limited by that requirement. I wanted to see whether the parameter of simply adding a stop was enough to give me similar results to those at EI200 whilst pushing the ISO higher to allow for the lower-light conditions.

I recently wrote a 5 Frames With Fomapan 400 where I described the results shot at EI1600 with a 2 stop push. Although these weren’t excessively bad I think I’ll be sticking to other films for my standard low light/push options – especially HP5. However I still wanted to see whether Fomapan 400 could work for me in any other use cases, and so shot this roll at EI200, one stop overexposed consistently. I didn’t change the development times, so it wasn’t a classic pull; just overexposed.

Fomapan is one of those films that I tried early on when I first started shooting film – a gateway option which allowed me to explore the process of a mechanical camera without having to think too much about the cost of consuming a more expensive film. I think because of this approach my opinion of Fomapan is based on a less than ideal situation, and the work I produced on it is not the greatest; not due to anything inherent about the emulsion itself, but because of my low level of technical skill.