Using Ilford XP2 for Visceral Street Photography Posted On 10th June 2018 To Magazine & Film specific

A recent development

Photography on film is a recent development in my workflow , (My black & white solution), and I have been making an effort to shoot film alongside digital on all of my major assignments, as well as for my personal work.

It only took one assignment for me to realize that although the use of film was novel it wasn’t offering anything different to my ability to tell a story within a 35mm frame.

There are so many ways to achieve a different “look” to your images, usually involving different lenses or creative filters and post processing effects;  I really wanted to find a way to make film work differently for me.

The answer was the Hasselblad XPan, which shoots across two frames of 35mm film to produce panoramic, cinematic images, with detail verging on medium format, and offering an entirely unique storytelling perspective.

My photography style has always been informed by cinematography, so being able to shoot with that field of view natively was very special, and I felt it was easy to adjust to searching for long compositions.

The XPan relies on film as something tangible and visceral. Being able to stretch an image across something physical is only possible through a physical medium – with a digital sensor you are limited and can only crop inwards. Film offers the possibility for cameras such as the XPan to use it creatively.

Film of choice

My film of choice on the XPan is Ilford XP2. I am able to shoot 20 frames from a 36 shot roll, and so far I have few that did not meet my expectations. My worry with the XPan was the limit of f/4 as the maximum aperture, but XP2 offers as close to the latitude of digital as I’ve ever been able to find.

I gladly use it at ISO 800 as standard, and never need to worry about intrusive grain, or loss of sharpness. Development of C41 is fast and easy, which means fast turnaround for assignment work. I struggled with native Black and White films like HP5 because it took a while to get the scans over to my clients, but XP2 has all the convenience of speed while ensuring the style of sharp, high contrast black and white.

For use in a cinematic camera XP2 has given me some of the most cinematic images I’ve shot. It renders light precisely and naturally, with enough glow to seem classic and natural, but with enough usable resolution to provide high quality scans and prints to a modern standard.