 Today, I'm loading up a roll of Ilfers HP5 Plus. I'm going to say something weird here, but I have never used this film before. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. But with bills to pay and a family to feed, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. Come along as I follow my passion trying to create art that shows the essence of nature in a photograph. I'll be sharing my successes and my failures in hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Riding the Edge. It's kind of weird that I've never used this film. It's got such a huge following. I know a lot of people really like it. I don't use a lot of 400-speed film. In the past, my go-to when I started journalism many years ago, my go-to was T-Max 400. I was an early adopter to that film. I loved it. I loved how it pushed. But for my nature photography, I tend to go with more of a 100-speed, 50-ISO, that type of thing. And lately, I feel like I'm kind of in a rut. That I need to try some different things, try some different looks. And so I thought a good place to start would be with a more classic grain that the HP5 should bring me. I think that might look good in some of the photos I make. And the detail shots, the intimate landscape. Even 400-speed film is probably too slow for hand-holding in these deep shadows. Really need a little bit of slightly overcast, kind of brighten up these areas. But even so, I might find something out in the light. We'll see. It's so easy to get stuck in our ways sometimes. And get into a pattern that might actually stifle creativity. And I've become very aware of that recently. That I need to expand my ideas a little bit. Not be so caught up on trying to get the finest grain image and the best resolution. This isn't going to be anywhere near what I get with my typical 100-speed Delta 100 or T-Max 100. But it might bring something else, a sense of spontaneity that I don't get when I'm using a tripod. And if all I get out of this is enjoyment, honestly, that's often good enough. If I'm not working on a specific project, sometimes photography, it doesn't need to be so serious. There's going to be a lot of photos out here in a month or two as spring kicks in. Right now we're looking more for the end-of-winter type photos. In this light, I'll probably end up doing quite a bit of photos that don't need a lot of depth of field. These ferns make a great subject for flow, the crossing. There's always some kind of interesting pattern I can get out of these sword ferns. Got a little dew on the ferns here. Kind of glistens. I hope it comes out on the film. I was photographing these new shoots, backlit, and then we've got the dark background. I'm not sure the meter is going to meter this correctly. I'm thinking it's going to overcorrect and it's going to really blow out the leaves, but I tried to compensate for it. So we'll see what happens. Pretty shallow depth of field, but the plan of focus is pretty flat. So I just like the shape that the stems were making and then the leaves were poking up. So it might be a kind of cool shot if it actually works out. Much like how a child plays and learns as they play. I think I'm doing the same thing as I play with this film, test out this film, and shoot it in a different way. It's almost like I'm using this as a sketch pad. I'm learning as I go. I'm having fun. If these photos don't work out, I'll know next time why they didn't work or if I come across something and I think I might want to photograph it in the future and I've already done it and found out that it just wasn't working for one reason or other, I won't even need to try to make that photograph. You would think after all these years I photographed pretty much everything, but I'm always building up a memory bank of potential photos. And now that I'm doing it with a different film, it's adding another layer to the memory bank. Well, this is what this looks like with some grain to it. You think it looked bad now? You should have seen me a few days ago. I've been quite unlucky this year for being able to avoid illness and I haven't been out for a couple weeks because I've been ill. Today is our first maiden voyage walk in a while. I just got to get moving. Every day is a little bit better and I still got a half a roll of film I want to get through. So please forgive my appearance in this video. I often like to play two different types of foliage against each other. We've got quite a bit different shapes with the fern and these more globular looking leaves around it. It kind of adds a visual contrast. Not saying that this is a great one, but it's kind of stuff I always look for to give a little bit of visual contrast, playing the shapes off of each other. I think the fern gives the sense of motion, kind of gives the eye a direction to go leading down into the other foliage. This section of forest behind me caught my attention. Sun's kind of coming through it a little bit this morning. Putting some interesting light in these trees. I've been wanting to try this film on some of my more forest woodland type shots. Some of the more intimate scenes. I want to get a few test shots to see how this grain will render these images so that I can get an idea if this is a setting that I might want to use this film. Well, I finished my last frame here on this stand of trees. I've photographed these trees before so this gives me an idea of what I can expect with a grainier rendition of the scene. There's nothing real special about it. It's got nice depth. I always like this slanted tree. But the purpose of this role was to test. It's been a blast. I've really enjoyed just kind of just playing with my camera. It's something I should be doing more often and I can really see a value of just walking around with a film that you can handhold and expect some results. It'll be nice to have an idea of what each film will do. And I can pick my film for the scene or the subject that I'm making photos of. That's one of the important things about film is it's an artistic choice. It's just a matter of trying to get out of my comfort zone a little bit and find other options that I can pull out as a creative choice. And that's what it's about. It's about a creative choice. I'm going to get this back to the house and develop it and see what we've got. If you haven't, if you don't hear from me again, until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride. You don't think I'd end this video without helping out here and giving you my impressions of this first roll of HP5 plus to you. Let's get into my final thoughts. Let me just say, I was really surprised by this film. I had made a lot of assumptions to what I would see in this film. And I think those assumptions were based on what I'd seen online on YouTube, other people's results. And I always thought, that doesn't look like something I'd want to use. I'm really glad I tested it for myself. My assumptions were this was a really grainy film, maybe high contrast. And I didn't think I would find the grain very pleasing. I've always kind of thought I preferred tea grain films and less traditional films or traditional grain. And I was so surprised by how much I actually liked the look of the grain on this film. I feel kind of silly that I haven't tried this film sooner. I knew it was very popular. I just couldn't see how I would use it in my photography. I think I understand now why this film is so popular. It looks to be something that's extremely versatile. It could be used for so many different things. It's relatively affordable for a professional film. It's something that I'm definitely going to want to experiment more with. There's going to be a spot in my bag for a role of Ilford's HP5+. If you've made this far, thanks for coming along. I hope you found this interesting and useful. I'm going to say, don't go by my results. Pick up a role yourself if you haven't used it or any film that you're interested in. And try it out for yourself. Use it with a developer you would normally work with. And see if it's going to work for you. There's a few other films now that I'm thinking I really need to try. I can't base my thoughts on film on what other people are doing. I need to do my own testing. So this is bringing in this video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.