Fortepan

Loris wrote:

>Fortepan films. The Fortepan 400 is especially
>interesting; AFAIK the emulsion consist of two layers:
>one ISO 400 sensivity, one ISO 50. I have friends that
>use it - they're happy with the results. Of course I
>don't know if you can find these in the States. We
>have plenty of Forte supplies here in Turkey. I use
>their B&W papers (also Kentmere) - nothing like Ilford
>but they're very cheap compared to "high end" papers
>like Ilford. And they do the job very nicely.
>
>Regards,
>Loris.
>

Yes, Fortepan film is available in the US. I have been involved in a
lot of film testing over the past month or so for a book project and
it is one of the films that I tested. It performs about on a par with
Ilford HP5+, which means that it is an ok film for medium and high
contrast scenes but something of a dog with low contrast lighting.
This is due to the fact that after a certain point of development the
contrast levels out and further time in the development merely
increases density, but not contrast. For printing with processes like
carbon, kallitype, palladium and Pt/Pd I would reserve it primarily
for high and medium contrast scenes.

For regular silver printing it has enough contrast to handle all
lighting conditions.

Sandy
Received on Thu Feb 26 21:29:17 2004