Recently I’ve been doing more darkroom printing, and thus had less desire to shoot positives of any sort. Still have an update planned on the x-pro reversal front, but the project got placed on hold for a bit.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been messing with in the meantime is Arista’s Ortho Litho film. Ortho film is different from most normal “Pan” film (or panchromatic). Panchromatic film is sensitive to all colors for the most part. However, Ortho film is only sensitive to the blue and green spectrum, not red. The exact response of course varies by film stock, but typically, it’s very blue sensitive, fairly green sensitive, slightly yellow sensitive, and completely red blind.

Arista’s Ortho Litho film is not for those that lack patience nor are they for places where not a single shot can be lost… Ortho Litho film is, to put it lightly, tempermental. You can get consistent results, but extreme care must be taken to perfect the process first, and then to follow each step exactly.

These are the problems that make it.. difficult:

Super high contrast without special development process

Processes that tame contrast usually have low max density

Extremely low speed. The nominal ISO ranges from 0.8 to 12 ISO. Exact speed highly depends on development process but higher speeds often result in higher contrast. This film surprisingly has decent exposure latitude for both over and under exposure, if processed in PMK Pyro at least.

Unexpected color response

Very easy to scratch

Only available in large format (well, for right now ;) )

But it is rewarding:

Unexpected color response

Extremely low speed. Ever wanted to shoot at f/3.5 in bright daylight with your camera that has a max shutter of 1/500? No problem, but you’ll need a tripod if you want depth of field. Longish exposure of 5s without neutral density filters in daylight? You’ll have to stop down to f/16 or f/22, but easily doable.

Fine grain (I wouldn’t say “very”, but really attractive grain structure without being obstructive)

Insanely cheap (by raw film area, tends to be around 3x cheaper than anything else on the market)

For right now, this blog post isn’t going to go into the color response. I’ve not shot nearly enough of it to put it’s weird response into words. Expect black trees, surprisingly decent sky detail (normally ortho film has no cloud detail), weird rock tones, and honest skin tones.

All of this is for in-camera shooting. I don’t own a large format camera, so I cut things down to 120 strips. Specifically I use a Yashica Mat 124G for this, and a lightmeter app on my iPhone for metering.

Development

The biggest problem with Ortho Litho is that it is designed for very high contrast applications, ie, lith half-tone etc. If you develop this as you would normal film, the result would be black and white with very little grey tones in between. If you want the super high contrast look for some reason, then it’s very easy to achieve with standard paper developer. High contrast can be useful for masks for darkroom printing. Anyway, so the key to getting reasonable contrast is to use developers and processes that tend to be dangerously low contrast with normal films.

Unfortunately these low contrast methods tend to suffer from a serious density problem. Here’s what I tried.. unfortunately I don’t have a good method of scanning these rough cut strips (I don’t own a LF camera, only 120), so I won’t have image samples of the early test failures

Paper developer

As expected, paper developer results in super high contrast results, and the film develops to completion extremely quickly. I wouldn’t say it takes longer than 1m. One recommendation I’ve seen for better continuous tone results is to dilute it to 1:1 or 1:2 or higher. I tried this with Ilford Multigrade down to 1:5 (working solution:water). The results I got were still very high contrast, but it was lower contrast than straight paper developer. With high dilution the result would be really interesting for masks, but not really suitable for enlargement or scanning. The result was that to the naked eye things looked fairly good with decent mid tones, but when under a loupe, the mid tones was actually just jet black grains with gaps, similar to how inkjet printing produces midtones with dots of ink. This might have an interesting look for a few things, but definitely not general purpose.

This is a quick cell phone pic of what this looks like on my enlarger. As you can see, very high contrast, almost no shadow detail, and only some mid tones in the highlights. This was actually an enlarger “print” onto the film from standard E-6 color slide film.

HC-110

HC-110 really interested me because there is a somewhat common alternative development process for varying contrast. The basic process is to figure out the proper time for the right speed with some dilution, and then to increase contrast by decreasing dilution or decrease contrast by increasing dilution. No time or temperature adjustment is necessary. Unfortunately the dilution necessary for reasonable contrast also results in very low max density. With HC-110 1:200 (the most common recommendation I see), even film developed under lights gives a strip of film that is a very mild grey. I increased the concentration to 1:100 and the grey did improve some, but not nearly as much as I’d like. At 1:50 the density looked reasonable. However, tests at this dilution resulted in high contrast, especially at higher speeds. This could have some potential, but the combination of high contrast with very little exposure latitude made me look for other methods. The primary problem was that with over exposure the highlights would get completely blown very easily.

Here is a shot of the negatives I got from this:

Lith developer

For fun, I tried using some diluted lith developer after I was done with a round of lith paper printing. The result was very contrasty and highly inconsistent due to short development time. With proper lith development this film will turn into an extreme contrast mask where the film is either 100% black or 100% clear. I didn’t bother capturing these results

Pyro PMK

I ordered some of this after a lot of reading about it’s unique results. It just so happened to arrive almost immediately after I did some test shots, and I had heard it had three big properties:

Low contrast

Capable of preserving even highly over exposed highlight details

Decreases/hides grain

This is the one I’ve been sticking with once I saw it has real potential of taming Ortho Litho. It doesn’t come without some problems though:

Pyro is messy and dangerous. Make sure to use gloves as skin exposure will burn, stain, and potentially cause you to develop an allergy. It also has a tendency to stain anything it touches.

Some pyro developers (not PMK) are more tempermental and variable. With PMK I’ve had consistent results with consistent process

Pyro stain is stripped by acid. The stain is what provides most of the benefits of pyro. This means you can not use a stop bath or acid fixer. TF-4 alkaline is the recommended fixer for this

Also don’t use photo-flo. It can strip stain as well. Basically only use developer, fixer, and water.

Very small dilutions are annoying. (needing to accurately measure 5ml basically requires a syringe)

That being said, if you’re patient, the results are worth it. This is the only developer I’ve seen that gives a very normal contrast (I actually had to increase the contrast to grade 3 or 3.5 while printing some images) while also maintaining a fairly good amount of density. One of the weird things is that the stain has color, it’s not just black and white like silver. The stain for PMK at least is an olive green to a mild orange. The color of course doesn’t affect B/W printing nor scanning, but does make reviewing negatives fun. Weirdly enough with this film, the positive-on-top effect is very real. If you look at the film at a downward angle with lights overhead, it’s very easy to see a positive of the image. It’s especially prevalent with Pyro, but I’ve seen it with every developer I’ve tried.

Here’s some of the results from my testing. These were all shot at either 1.5 or 3 ISO. 1.5 usually looks better, but 3 can really be helpful in preserving sky detail. Also, my Mat 124G apparently has developed a focus problem, so you’ll just have to pay attention to the tones since most have missed focus.. Also, this was all testing so expect a lot of dust and scratches.

Finally, here is something to illustrate the speed response of this film. These are brackets taken at 0.8, 1.5, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, and 192 ISO, respectively. All were scanned at fixed exposure for the ideal scan of ISO 3. A lot more detail is in the highlights at 0.8 and 1.5, but the fixed exposure caused it to be missed.

And finally, here is a picture showing the incredible over exposure latitude. I was aiming for ISO 3 with f/16 and 1/4s. The camera’s shutter stuck though and it ended up being exposed for around 10 seconds. The picture is all blurry cause after waiting around 8s I started to mess with and bang the camera to try to get the shutter unstuck. Eventually I just wound it. I wanted to avoid winding with the shutter open for fear of damaging the shutter, as well as because it causes the next frame to be exposed. I did not used fixed exposure on scanning this of course, otherwise it’d be straight white. The image is clearly visible with the naked eye on the negative too.

Low Speed

The exact speed depends on development process, but it’s pretty safe to say this film is incapable of anything faster than 12 ISO without extreme amounts of contrast. What can you do with this kind of film? I’ve had fun with the slow speed of it. I hate carrying a tripod, but some of the effects are worth it. You can shoot in bright daylight stopped down to f/16 or f/22 and actually expose the film for multiple seconds (rating the film at 0.8 ISO is safe in PMK), causing ghostly effects of anything moving. Normally you need to use neutral density filters to achieve this kind of picture, and something about ND filters always rubbed me the wrong way. They seems to always have some strange characteristic “look” to any picture they make, be it digital or film. Typically there is a ton of contrast, and very strong corner vignette. Meanwhile, using super slow film like this, the entire frame looks properly exposed, the lens characteristics are usually still pretty good at f/16 or f/22, keeping things sharp, and overall it just looks like a normal picture without that daylight long exposure “look”… This lets you make some really ghostly looking images while not introducing any weird character into the final result. Now of course, despite this film seeming to have almost limitless over exposure latitude, it does eventually just add fog. You’ll lose a lot of highlight details exposing it more than a few stops beyond 0.8 ISO, and it’ll be a pain to properly scan. The idea though is that even when you need ND filters, you can use a lighter one of a few stops, rather than the huge distorting ones that reduce exposure by 10+ stops, and you shouldn’t need to stack filters to achieve a slow enough shutter speed.

The other interesting use for this film is being able to shoot wide open with slow cameras in broad daylight, with no worry of over exposure. This can be really interesting for portraits. In particular, skin tones can be interesting with this. With women it can be a bit harsh, but ortho film is known for making men look “macho” and rough. It’s also of course interesting for still lifes of specific objects up close and all that.

And finally, this super low speed film is not grain free like one might expect. I actually really like the grain structure of this film. It’s readily apparent at 120 negative sizes, but never gets in the way of a razor sharp subject. At intended sheet film sizes with contact prints, the grain would be invisible for the most part. For pyro PMK development especially, it yields easier to print negatives than I expect. Don’t be afraid to bump up the contrast to 3 or 3.5 though. This film in 1:1:100 PMK tends to be a bit flat. Tones of great tone separation for post processing/printing, but flat when printed as-is at a neutral grade of 2. It also does get very grainy when under exposed as you can see from the brackets above.

Large-format only (til now)

This film only comes in large formats, with 4x5 being the minimum size. Getting into large format requires a whole different type of dedication due to the weight, expense, and bulky film. It’s not something I’m ready to get into anytime soon, but it’s really cumbersome to deal with small single exposure strips of 120 film to use it with my Mat 124G (my only full manual 120 camera). I ended up doing some tests with multiple 5" strips being taped into a 120 backing paper, and this worked well though with the obvious problems of dealing with multiple strips. After figuring out that this film had real potential I ended up ordering a 24"x100ft roll of the stuff. This was actually the cheapest format I could get where I could cut a 32" length (nominal film length for 120). I cut some of it over the weekend, wasted 5 rolls worth, but overall had some success. The biggest problem was dust and scratches as well as slightly inaccurate cutting. I wasn’t too careful since this 10-roll sheet was for testing anyway.

With the size of film I ordered, I can make up to 375 rolls of 120 film. I definitely can’t shoot anything close to this much film, so as a way to recoup costs I plan on selling around 250 rolls, and hopefully wasting less than 50 rolls in mistakes. I’d really like to eventually test out some stuff like making my own edge markings and doing pre-flashing (Ortho Litho really benefits from some pre-flash). But for right now it’s super simple. No edge markings, no pre-flash. It is loaded in a red light darkroom, so it’s possible that the red light could make a non-image forming change that would decrease contrast. I’ve not seen any effect like this with my testing so far. The maximum red light time should be 10 minutes per strip, and at 20 minutes there was no image in my safelight testing, so I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Some other people I know have handled this film with these lights for 45 minutes even with no problems. This will of course come with some disclaimers.. don’t use it for priceless pictures or anything. It’s still possible there could be some defects since this is done by hand, etc. Since my main goal with this stuff is darkroom printing, I don’t want to deal with any dust or scratches.. so I need to perfect this process for myself either way. The emulsion of this film is incredibly easy to scratch. Even rubbing the film on a piece of plastic or felt will induce some scratching, so it obviously must be cut and loaded emulsion up.