 Today we got Delford's Delta 400 and Nikon F5. Two firsts for me. Let's come along for the ride. Well it is dark, rainy, stormy, all of the above today. I thought it would be a good time to try out this Delta 400. I have never shot Delta 400. So today is the first. Right now I'm shooting across this river. There's a lot of light colored trees that their limbs kind of come down towards the ground. It almost reminds me of electricity. I shot in this location a couple years ago with a digital camera. I haven't shot in film so I thought it would be kind of nice to get another look at it. It's very one dimensional. It's very flat. There's not any foreground interest. It's all about the light and the dark and the lines. Hopefully the light branches will look etched out against the dark. Very kind of abstracty. I think in black and white this has a lot of potential though. And since this is a new camera to me I'm also putting it through its paces. I'm going to go with the matrix metering to see how good it is. See if I can trust it. You know, you gotta get all this stuff out of the way before you do a lot of photography. I feel like lately all I've been doing is testing stuff. So today we're... Well, I don't know how long it's going to take to do this video but we're starting out today with testing out this Nikon F5 and using this Delta 400. Using Delta 400 marks a major shift in how I do photography and how I see film photography. We'll get into that in just a little bit. I'm lining up a shot with this tree that's putting on its spring color, spring leaves. They're just starting to pop out. You can still see through the tree kind of see the skeleton of the tree and all these nice little light-colored dots around. It might become an interesting photo if it's kind of zooming fairly tight on it so you can see some of the structure but you get all these nice speckled highlights. They really stand out in this really dark, dirty day. I'm using a 70-200. This one doesn't get a lot of use. I've got time to start putting it back into action. This kind of photography is perfect. It gives me so many different options for different compositions. The only downside is it's fairly heavy compared to my 85. It's super versatile. Sometimes it's worth carrying the extra weight. I'm not hiking a lot today so we're going to use it. It matches up real nice with this F5. It's starting to rain pretty hard. I'm going to get into this tree for a little while and see if it lets up. Talk a little bit about what has changed in my thinking on film photography. When I started photography, all there was was film. So I learned on film. So all of my ideas on photography about film, how to use film, what do I want from my film photography. All those ideas were shaped and formed very early on, many years ago. Back then, I wanted the least amount of grain in an image I could get. I was shooting transparencies for all my nature photography. My hope was to get published in magazines and books, calendars, that kind of thing. And all the submissions were on slides. And I think that really influenced how I viewed film photography even when I came back to it many years later. And I've come to the conclusion that that thinking is outdated now because we're in the digital age. I have other options to get grainless photos, to get really sharp high-resolution images. That's digital. That's what digital cameras are great for. But what I realized about myself was I was still approaching film photography the same way I did many years ago. And I was still trying to get that image that had very little grain or no grain. Why am I still trying to do photography that way? I mean, I can get any of that with my digital camera. It makes absolutely no sense. I mean, you'll never see me using a 400-speed film years ago, ever, on nature photography. Just because I said it doesn't mean I haven't used 400-speed film. In fact, I've shot thousands of rolls of 400-speed film because that's what I used to document. That was what I used on the job. I used T-Max 400. And then we'd push that as far as we needed to. I'm not new to 400-speed film. I've just avoided it doing my nature photography. And back then I wasn't doing black and white either. It was always color. But when I came back to film, black and white was my passion. It was what I really wanted to explore more. But I was still keeping that mindset of I want the images to be super fine grain. So I started with medium format. Then I went to large format. And now I'm all the way back to 35mm because I realize something. The grain might be something I want. That was one of the few things that make it different than digital photography. I'm sure you can add grain to a digital image. To me, that always looks fake and it doesn't feel authentic. I would rather find a film that produces grain in a way that I like. I don't necessarily like all grain. I don't want to go crazy with the grain. But I'm willing to explore how I can use grain in my photography. It doesn't mean I'm going to stop using Hunter's Bee Film. There are certain things I want a cleaner look but maybe just a little bit of grain. But there are times when I might want a more pronounced grain. For my research and for what I've been looking at I have a limit though. Certain grains I'm not attracted to. I'm not a big fan of HP5 or tracks. I really offend a lot of people. But I never really care for the grain. It just seems a little harsh to me. That's why I'm using this Delta 400. T-Max 400 worked fine. It was great actually. But I want to see what the Delta 400 will do. I'm really enjoying the Delta 100. So I'm going to give Delta 400 its test, its try. It might a little more grain than the T-Max 400. I love spring. I love this way. This is hanging down. And I'm hoping with the dark background it really stands out. It's going to be all nice to leaf out here pretty soon. This is kind of a cool shot. It's coming down pretty good now. I picked a pretty stormy day to come out. It's the only day of the week I could actually get out here. We've made a pretty good start to this film. Made a few frames. We may have to finish it a little bit later in the week. We'll get a little more accommodating weather. It's a little bit stormy right now. Getting water on everything. The following morning to finish off the roll I mounted a 85mm 1.8 lens to the F5. I made a few handheld spring detail shots while on a walk with my dog Nori. To wrap up this video I thought I should give my impressions on this first experience with Delta 400. Much like Delta 100 I'm drawn to the tonality of Delta 400. It's a very flexible film and the way I develop and shoot I didn't find it overly contrasty and I thought it scanned very well with my DSLR. The grain, although it's present I find it structured to be very pleasing to my eye. I like the film's sharpness of the fine details. In the shots of the abstract trees the tree creatures if you let your imagination run wild I like the texture and the sharpness of Delta 400. I think it works well for these types of shots. In the autofocus areas in detail shots I like the uniformness of the grain I found it very pleasing. I didn't find it distracting it kind of had a smooth quality to it. So overall my first experience with this film has been very positive. I really like what I'm seeing. So going forward I can see a good case for why I would want to use Delta 400. It's just a beautiful film that seems to fit my photography style very well. That brings us to the end of today's video. I hope you enjoyed this little outing with Delta 400 and I'm looking forward to taking some more out in the future. So until next time thanks for coming along for the ride.