 In this episode of Riding the Edge, I'm headed to a couple of local waterfalls with a few sheets of Elford's FP4 Plus. I'm trying to answer that elusive question, is FP4 the film for me? Well, let's find out once you come along for the ride. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, 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. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black and white photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Riding the Edge. Well, today I'm back out trying some more. I have an update to my last video. So I'm trying to dial in the development time. I just shot a waterfall. It's pretty noisy in there. So I didn't get any talking. I took two sheets of film there, bracketing my exposures. Because really, I need to get this dialed in. If I'm going to use this film, I need to feel confident that my dial-up times or my exposures are good. So I took a couple frames of that waterfall. Let's see if I can find something else down the trail here. This is just going to be a short video. It's a short trip. I think water is a good place to look for grain. I think waterfalls and streams and that kind of thing are a good place to examine the grain in your images, at least in my images. That's kind of why I'm out here. Plus it's just a really neat area. Probably won't hear a lot from me today. It's just going to be a couple quick shots and we're out of here. But I'll show you what I get. In my last video, I shot a few sheets of this FP4 and I wasn't very happy with the development times. Some really thin negatives. So I'm kind of reserving my judgment on this film until I actually get a negative that I feel represents what this film can do. What I'm expecting from this film is more of a classic look. Classic black and white. It's an older style film. So I'm not sure if that's for me or not because I've only been shooting tea grain films for quite a while. So shooting something that's more of a throwback in large format might be kind of cool. As I make my way up this rocky stream bank, I'm reminded why I don't photograph this waterfall. It's extremely difficult to get to. It's a very steep bank going down. The rocks are very slippery. And I've never really been happy with the compositions I've made of this waterfall. They're just not a lot of options for compositions down there. But since I put that much effort to get there, I went ahead and exposed a couple sheets of film. Gotta make it worth the effort. Now that I've got a few shots of FP4 exposed, I think that's what I need to see what this film can do. When I brought this first image up on the screen, my response was, oh, I think I might like this. I'd say I'm quite happy with the results. Now that I've got a good development, a good negative to judge the film by, I'm intrigued by this film. I'm surprised at how much I really like it. It's not exactly what I expected. I didn't expect the grain to be so fine. Now I expected that it wouldn't be overly grainy. I mean, it's a medium speed film and it's a really large piece of film. But I didn't expect it to compete so well against the tea grain films that I've been using. And I can't quite put my finger on it. This image to me has a more organic feel. I guess that's where I'm going to use. It looks to me like it was exposed on film. The advantage to using such a large piece of film is it gives me a lot of freedom in editing the file without bringing out too much of the grain and not have to worry about that. If I zoom in on this grain in the water, it's pretty much non-existent. I mean, it's there. Of course it is. Not in any way that's going to affect my photography. I do think this film is a little punchier than what I'm used to. And that might just be the developer I'm developing in. But not in a bad way. It's still very controllable. I'm getting plenty of detail where I want it in the shadows. And my highlights are detailed. And that's all I really want. When I scan the negative, I'm scanning it to be kind of flat. Pretty much the same process I do with my raw files when I'm shooting digital is I take a fairly flat image into my editor and then I kind of layer the contrast to flavor. I dodge and burn, add more contrast where I need it to make the image I want. One of the tests or experiments I've been wanting to do for some time is to see what kind of one-shot panorama I can get from cropping on my 4x5 sheet of film. So this image, this waterfall is five inches wide in his crop top and bottom. So it's like a 6x17 format. And it was made with my 90 millimeter lens. And I think it works quite well. It's a five inch piece of film. So the image quality is plenty good. And this last shot is the same waterfall but with a standard crop. Now I switched lenses and now I've got the 135 millimeter on here. Just slightly wider than normal. I think that works pretty well from this vantage point. So all in all, I think the test was a success this time. I'm not going away feeling like I can't make my mind up. Now I'm basing all my judgment on these few frames. But from what I've seen, I'm really liking this film. I haven't seen anything from these sheets of film that would make me think this isn't a film I want to use. It has a little bit different look. But I think I like it. I'm going to keep using it. I'm going to keep working with it. Maybe still fine-tune the development just a little bit. So my final thoughts is Elford's FP4 plus the film for me. Well, I think it is. I really like what I'm seeing. So I'm going to end today's video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.