With a friend’s wedding coming up later this year and being an avid photographer, I decided that as my gift to them I would photograph some highlights from the day and present them to them in an album.
I was after a film I could use for both the day ceremony and the evening celebrations. This limited me a lot and I started playing around with the light meter app on my phone to work out what ISO film I would need to cover the lower light conditions. I initially settled on Lomography Colour 800, but as this was sold out in a lot of places (or attracted exorbitant delivery charges) I started looking at ILFORD Delta 3200 Professional.
I checked out some sample images online and fell in love with the heavy grain and deep contrast. I also read up on other peoples experiences and saw that a lot of people were recommending shooting at 1600 and developing normally to give the negatives a bit more weight. From my earlier exposure experiments that settled it and three rolls were ordered.
I knew that I needed to test out the film at the intended EI of 1600 before diving straight in at the wedding. So I loaded up my Nikkormat EL and went on a street photography outing to the centre of Sheffield, UK, with my local photography group.
With the bright sunlight during the day, I threw on an ND8 filter to compensate for the camera’s maximum shutter speed of 1/1000 and the lens’ minimum aperture of f/16. I saved a few frames at the end to test low light/night time exposures and wandered out that evening to the wooded roads in my local area to finish off the roll.
After getting the film back I was ecstatic with the results and knew I had made the right choice with this film. I was so happy, in fact, that I might just have to do another “test” roll, just for fun.
~ Alex
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2 responses to “5 Frames… With ILFORD Delta 3200 Professional (EI 1600 / 35mm format / Nikkormat EL)”
Hiya, they were developed by my local lab. I did add a bit of contrast through lightroom, but I had read that exposing at 1600 was the way to get the best out of this film and it seems to have worked.
Nice photos. I’d be interested to know how the negs were developed. My experiences with this film so far have been mixed.