This last week has had really beautiful mornings and the other day, I decided to go for another tryout with the bulk of Agfa APX100. I bought this bulk a while back as I found that it was the cheapest bulk-film on the market and I was curious about its performance and capabilities. So far, I have not been really sold on this film. I find it grainy, slow and to lack latitude. I also find that, even with a very sharp lens and a very accurate camera, I get very inconsistent results. In this entry, I paired it up with my Olympus OM-1 and the 50mm Zuiko f1,8 lens.
From my previous experience with this film, I have found that metering it at 50 – a whole stop over-exposure – and developing for box-speed typically gives me the best results. Also, the yellow filter usually gives me a bit more contrast and definition in my negatives. This was also my tactic for this outing, and my results were just as inconsistent as they have been previously.
Since it was very early in the morning, and I wanted to travel very light, I chose to leave the light meter at home and rely on the light metering app I have on my phone. This is a very simple light meter, but I can easily meter at different places in the scene to get a decent exposure. I have done this in many instances before and never had any issues with poor exposures. If hesitant, I double up with an additional exposure just to be sure that I have at least one usable one. I’ll honestly say, that I only got one out of my 15 exposures this time to be anything that I would refer to as a decent image and what I had in mind while composing.
In this first image, which is the only one that I am actually happy with, the film manages the masterpiece of being both over and underexposed at the same time when the range was within about 4 stops. Even so, I find this image to really convey the mood of this morning very well and I like its dark gloominess. However, I know that this image would have looked far better on both Fomapan 100 and FP4 plus, which both are very affordable alternatives to the Agfa APX100, and that gives me more consistent results.
For my second composition, I wandered into the woods looking for a slow-flowing river passing under a very simple bridge. This image did not turn out in any way the way I thought it would. To me, this image is just a grey mesh with a lot of grain and lacking definition on what the real subject was. Even with heavy dodging and burning, I still am not convinced with this result. I also made three bracketed images of this, and all of them are severely lacking on definition.
In the two upcoming images, you see the main issue with this film, completely lost shadow-detail even with a full stop over-exposure and metered for the shadows. I will keep trying this film for different purposes, but I must say, that it does not look like this film is for me and my use. I’ve read about people using this film for one or two stop push-processes, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why, when I have these issues when overexposing it.
Cheap Camera Adventures 