Fuji have re-released the "limited edition" Fortia SP slide film in Japan. It’s ISO 50 (though it’s recommended that you shoot it at 64), has extremely high colour saturation (apparently higher than Velvia 50), and high contrast. It’s available in 35mm and 120 with no plans for distribution outside of Japan. You can order it [...]

In May, I re-posted Oran Grad’s post from The Online Photographer about a high-speed, ISO 24,000 black and white reversal (slide) film that Kodak’s research department came up with and was quite excited about its implications for pinhole and zone plate photography. Unfortunately, it appears that there wasn’t enough interest and they will not be offering the film commercially.

Yesterday, I posted (well, lifted Oren Grad’s post from The Online Photographer) about an ultra high-speed ISO 24,000 B&W reversal film emulsion that Kodak have developed, but one implication didn’t hit me until today: if released commercially, it would allow handheld pinhole photography at normal shutter speeds.

Oren Grad’s entire post from The Online Photographer: No, that’s not a typo. This week at the International Congress of Imaging Science in Rochester, NY, Kodak researchers presented a new silver halide emulsion that is thermally developed to produce a positive image at speeds of up to ISO 24,000. You can read the conference abstract [...]

Ken Wronkiewicz posted a rebuttal to my recent article, Why are we still shooting slide film?, bringing up something I completely failed to consider: slide film has a greater Drange (density range) than print film does. This means that while you give up dynamic range, you get a significantly better contrast range in what you [...]

The ~5 stops that most slide film can capture is simply not enough for many non-studio lighting situations. It’s quite common to be faced with the choice of having to severely blow out a bright area or severely block up shadows. Landscape photographers who shoot with view cameras or SLRs can sometimes get around this with split ND filters, but not everybody can take 20 minutes to set up a shot, not every subject has a brightness boundary that falls in a conveniently straight line, and there are plently of cameras that don’t let you look through the lens to see what you’re doing (rangefingers, TLRs, pinholes, toys, etc.), so it’s not a solution for everybody.

According to Fuji’s press release, the new Provia 400X Professional ISO 400 slide film features: Brilliant color reproduction: Fujichrome Provia 400X Professional provides new levels of color saturation in ISO 400 class films. Ultra-fine grain: Fujichrome Provia 400X Professional provides exceptionally fine grain for a 400 speed color reversal film (RMS: 11). Rich tone reproduction: [...]