I am putting together a B&W slide project for a course, and I have been using "AFGA 200X Scala professional reversing film" for a majority of the shots. For the first batch of shots however, I was using Kodak T-MAX 3200 B&W because I was shooting outside in a graveyard at night with nothing but some sparse exterior illumination. My question is, what will be the outcome of the 3200 compared to the AFGA (which was adjusted to 800 ISO) besides grain....?\

Any help will be appreciated,

-- P. Hawkes (hawkes@idirect.com), February 03, 1999

Answers

Well the first difference is that Scala is a reversal film while TMZ is a negative film. That means that you will have to reverse process your film to get slides. I've never tried reverse processing TMZ so I can't tell you how it will turn out. Different films will give you different results when reverse processing. For instance reverse processing TMX has always given me more contrasty slides than the negatives would have been from straight processing but they arent too bad. Other films give different results. Tech pan gives extremely contrasty reversals. I've reverse processed several films including TMX, Tech Pan, HP5 and FP4 and have gotten satisfactory results from all of them keeping in mind the limitations of the particular film. For reverse processing supplies you have basically a limited number of options. Scala has to be processed by a lab (I've never used Scala so I'm not really sure what the reversal process is for this film). Kodak sells a reversal kit called a Tmax Reversal Kit. Photographer's Formulary also sells a reverse processing kit that is based on the chemistry in the article by Hans Deitrich in Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques (Mar/Apr 1988). The article can be seen at http://www.seanet.com/~jwsmith/tmaxrev.htm . One other thing that you may be tempted to do is use one of the C41 black and white films such as XP2 or T400CN and have it crossprocessed in E6 chemistry. Bear in mind that that gives slides with a color cast from the color mask in the film. Good luck.

-- Fritz M. Brown (brownf{DHWTOWERS/TOWERS3/brownf}@dhw.state.id.us), February 03, 1999.

One other thing that I intended to mention in my first response. Be carefull when projecting black and white slides. Unless you have a very effective heat absorbing glass between the lamp and the slide, the heat from the lamp will melt the slide rather quickly. Just a note of warning.

-- Fritz M. Brown (brownf{DHWTOWERS/TOWERS3/brownf}@dhw.state.id.us), February 03, 1999.