After buying the Leica M6 I bought whatever films I could find and among those also was an Agfa APX400 black and white film. It was lying in the fridge for more than a year before I finally conviced myself to use it.
Processing and scanning was done at urbanfilmlab in Germany.
The pictures you see in this article are from 1 roll.
I think I said it before: I am not a big fan of black and white 35mm film. My world simply isn’t black and white by design and it doesn’t bring me as much joy as color negative film.
I will leave it at that and I will leave you with a few picture impressions from this film here, maybe it can be of use to some of you.
Further reading
- Analogue Adventures Landing Page
- All Reviews of M-mount lenses
- Review: Pergear 35mm 1.4
- Technical Knowledge
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Lovely work, B&W is my favourite. The Nokton 40/1.4 is very good, and “good enough” really.
I am not only impressed by your compositions, but as well the technical quality of the pictures. Do you have any info about film processing from the lab?
I am not doing much, just sending it to the lab stated at the beginning 😅
Not sure if they do anything special or out of the ordinary.
Well maybe I should try it this way too, instead of home developing… 😃
Very nice pictures anyway.
I’ve never shot this film before — it looks like very good stuff. Thank you for sharing these results!
Since you bought the film in the last years, and I guess new and not from old stock, this is actually just a relabelled Harman film (likely Kentmere 400), not the original APX400 (the last stock of APX 100 was sold off more then 10 years ago, APX 400 probably earlier. I still have some in my freezer…).
And since it is black and white: How was it developped, since there is no standard process as for color negatives (C41)? Often commercial labs use D-76, but it could also be something else, and influences the look.
And: You’ve got a CLE? Cool. I am a long time Minolta user (manual and AF SLR, TLR, point&shoot), but my only rangefinder from them is a Hi-matic 7sII.
Just checked on the website by myself: They don’t state which BW developer they use, which is a pity. But I still guess it’s D76 or XTOL.
At home I use for faster films like this HC-110 and for ISO 100 and slower Rodinal, just because both have a long shelf-life and are easy to use… In case you learn to like B&W at least for some occasions, home development for those is easy and fun (at least for me and some, but of course everyone is different…). B&W scans also relatively easier. And then the next (easy step) is bulk rolling, not only for saving a few bucks, but also loading shorter rolls or whatever you like….
Bastian:
To facilitate a “warm up” to the aesthetic of B&W, might I respectfully suggest that you try a roll in an SLR, with a lens a bit longer in focal length than the 35 and 40mm that you used here (I suggest 85 to 105mm) — the longer focal lengths because B&W is an abstraction and longer focal lengths as they are often used produce a flatter perspective that is itself a bit of an abstraction, and an SLR because of its much better viewfinder view than a rangefinder for longer focal lengths.
The contrast seems to be beautiful, but I wonder how much of that is explained by the lens and how much it is explained by the film
I’ve never been a fan of black and white, but you sir do it wonderfully 😘
Thanks a lot!