I was sent some FT12 120 Film by an anonymous SFLaB subscriber (no, it wasn’t the supplier) to try out and having known nothing of this film I thought I’d do a bot of research and see what it is. I found the only supplier which was Nik & Trick of Folkestone in Kent UK. Here is the link and information I found on this film. https://ntphotoworks.com/product/ft-12-high-contrast-50asa-bw-35mm-film-24-exp/
I made a video for the channel of this shoot. You can view the video on the SFLaB channel here.
So. I found out that film is absolutely nuts in contrast. What could I shoot with it? I knew any scapes would be out of the question and I thought woodland would be not great either so I decided to go to an area called Seaview which is basically a beach but it has been modernised and has some nice sea walls and rocks and boats. Perfect.
I shot the film at 50ASA and metered my scenes mostly with incident. I developed the film in ID11 at 8 mins 1:1. Here are my scanned results. I don’t know what happened with the second image. It appears under exposed, even though I know I metered this correctly and had the correct settings in camera. Totally baffled me! It was 1/30th of a second and thinking back I remember the camera, MAMIYA RZ, shutter sounded quite quick for 1/30th. Maybe the battery needs changing? Who knows…It’s film right! The first image I noticed had strange artefacts in the sky. For the life of me I don’t know what it is as it didn’t present itself in the other frames. Interesting.
I really liked this film! I can imagine for any rugged, gritty photography such as Street or Abstract it would be great. Just don’t expect grain. I could see hardly any at all. And as for tonality. It’s there presented between bright highlights and inky blacks.
