If there’s one name synonymous with black and white film it’s Ilford and I’m sure almost everyone reading this blog will have shot at least one roll of HP5 in their lifetimes. So, when late last year Ilford announced the arrival of their first ever colour film to be made at the factory in Mobberly it certainly sent a few ripples through the film shooting community. At long last we had a colour film made in the UK, and it was exciting to see an innovative new product come to market which is increasingly being saturated by re-packaged Kodak stock.

Ilford, like many other manufacturers historically, had a special black and white film (XP2) that could be developed in the C-41 process normally reserved for colour film for easy development. C-41 is what was widely available in Boots and other chemists when you wanted your negatives developed and printed. Harman Phoenix 200 was born from experimentation with this existing chemistry and it’s heartening to see the lab technicians are so young, showing that new blood is not only being drawn into the industry on the shooting side. For those wondering why it’s called ‘Harman’ and not ‘Ilford’, it’s simply due to historic licensing reasons as the UK and European operations were split into two separate entities during the fallow period at the end of the film era. If you’ve ever seen Ilford printing paper, that’s from the company based in Germany.

My initial excitement was tempered a little by the example images I was seeing online. For an ISO 200 film it looked incredibly grainy, as though the film had been underexposed, and the exposure latitude was very poor for negative film which can usually soak up large amounts of light in a way slide or even digital is not able to do. There was also plenty of halation which some people love and others not so much. I personally don’t mind it, but I do feel it has become a bit of a fad. That all said it’s important to support new innovation if we don’t want to be stuck with the same old same old. Ilford have made it clear that this is a first step and money raised from the initial release will be put back into further development. It will be exciting to see how things change over the coming years.

Beyond that, what are shooters actually looking for in a film stock in the 21st Century? In the days of film people wanted the best quality they could afford, but nowadays if that was your aim you would just shoot digital. The imperfections are now a selling point along with it’s different look and feel, something more retro and in some ways more authentic. A film’s limitations may actually be a strength, and fundamentally does it matter how much grain a film has when it still captures a great memory of a trip or time spent with friends and family?

I bought my first roll at the annual Photography Show earlier this year and ultimately decided to put it through my oldest (but also newest to me) 35mm camera, the Leica iii. I thought it would be fun to shoot such an old looking film with a ninety-year-old uncoated lens. Over a couple of trips to London and a shoot with classic cars I had a variety of subjects, erring on the side of overexposing to try and get the best out of it. That seemed to work well as my images were less grainy than a lot of the ones I had seen online, though the blown-out highlights in the sky produced some interesting results. The colour palette of the film is warm like Kodak, but it is orange and blue as opposed to orange and teal and there is much more contrast. The oranges are punchier and the blues significantly darker, most likely due to the film’s limited dynamic range. Amusingly skin tones are rendered orange in a way that isn’t very true to life. Something that I think will be a bit marmite for film shooters.

Normally with halation on films like Cinestill 800, you only get it when shooting artificial light sources that are much brighter than their surroundings. Shooting Harman Phoenix was the first time I had seen major halation in the sky during the day, radiating orange instead of blowing out white. But as I said before, sometimes the limitations can actually be a way of making creative effects, case in point the image heading this blog with the giant ants attacking a popular spot at London Bridge. The glowing sky gives the scene a truly apocalyptic feel reminiscent of something out of Fallout. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to capture blue skies but the exposure value for the sky really does need to be close to the exposure value of your subject.

After the apocalypse, my favourite photo is the two-shot panoramic of HMS Belfast, created through a careful handheld pan before stitching the images together in Lightroom after digitising. The rendering certainly gives it a period feel and goes to show that even when you use this film with very old gear, if you give it enough light it is capable of surprisingly good detail. As ever film photography is often an exercise in experimentation.

Would I recommend people try this film? Absolutely, it’s critical we all support new endeavours even if they have some flaws in the beginning, otherwise where is the incentive to create something new? If we want to shoot more than just re-packaged Kodak stock we need to put our hands in our pockets on occasion. For a colour film it is well priced at around £13 per roll, which does put it lower than the equivalents from Lomography and Kodak’s Portra but as price increases have slackened off it is more expensive than their consumer options of Colorplus, Gold and Ultramax which Harman Phoenix is competing against. But it is something different and there is great value in that. Hopefully over time the formula will be improved and new colour films added to the line-up. Though maybe the grain addicts will be pining for the original formula to make a permanent fixture.

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