No.5

There are fast film stocks, medium speed ones, slow ones....and then there are those that are decidedly glacial. NoColorStudio's Experimental No.5 is one such emulsion. Spooled onto recycled film cassettes, you get 29 exposures per roll. For Father's Day a while back, my Son kindly gifted me a roll, along with two others, NCS's No10 and Kosmo Foto's Agent Shadow. All three emulsions are superb, but No5 is definitely something more of a challenge, being an iso 5, high contrast, orthochromatic offering. Still, the effort reaps ample rewards. I've only shot the one roll to date, but it's caught my imagination sufficient to want to get to know it better.

I ran the film through my old Spotmatic and Super Takumar 55mm f1.8 lens, the fast aperture allowing me to handhold. My exposures were determined with my Gossen Lunasix F, which easily accomodates the low iso setting.

My development parameters may need a bit of fine-tuning, but there's not a lot of info out there regarding it's use with caffenol. I took a 'shot in the dark' and, having shot it at box speed, developed it for 15 minutes at 20oC in a slightly modified version of the Delta recipe.

Contrast by the bucketful and an apparent lack of sensitivity to much of anything other than blue.

The results were a little thin, but I managed to get some eminently useable images, albeit with a fair bit of character, as you can see. The grain is wonderfully fine, with bags of detail. No surprise in a way, as it was originally intended for use in microfiche libraries back in the day. The orthochromatic spectral response, of course, adds a lot to the 'look' - one that I'm rather fond of.

This film has the potential to give excellent results, although I think I have some way to go in refining my use of it. I look forward to further adventures with No.5

                                                           ~~~~~~~~ *~~~~~~~~~

Thank you you for stopping by. If you enjoyed reading this please consider making a contribution to our collective future and Help plant a tree or visit:-

Ancient and Sacred Trees