A couple of months ago a friend in Berlin sent me a roll of Lomography’s Fantôme Kino black and white film. It was way too dark and cloudy to shoot it over winter, but we’ve had a few brighter weeks recently, so I thought I’d finally give it a go. Some days have been starkly bright actually, which I think is perfect for this ISO 8 rated film. The lowest ISO film I’d shot before was Rollei RPX 25, so I didn’t actually know what to expect to be honest.

I didn’t realise the film is not DX coded, so my camera remained at 200 ISO (rating for last film I shot before this one), and I shot a couple of frames like this, before manually pushing the ISO down to 25; as low as I could get it in my dad’s old Chinon. Those first frames were pretty much wasted (very underexposed). Most of the shots I took indoors at ISO25 were very underexposed too, but I got lucky with two that I shot right in front of a window on a sunny morning. On the whole, this is one for outdoors. Or flash and tripod indoors. Apart from the leaf double-exposure below, I shot the whole thing freehand. 🙂

As far as development goes, I used Rodinal at the timing they recommend for Compard R09 (8min) and used Ilford stopbath and fixer. Despite using Ilfotol in my final wash, I had issues with watermarks again. Super annoying. And constant problems with dust while scanning. I feel like I have tried everything to reduce dust while scanning, but still have issues. Would love some tips. Worth mentioning that this is super curly film, so was a pain to scan. Might be easier if you have a flatbed, don’t know, but I was up until 1 am and I started scanning at 9 pm. Jokes.

Here are the best of the results I got: