Ilford’s Delta 400

So I have been at a loss as of what to write on this blog for quite sometime, spending my time elsewhere on other projects as well blogging on another site which has little to no similarities to this blog. For the time being, I am going to try to keep this photo related but who knows, I may change that down the road and add differing content.

Recently, I picked up a couple rolls of Ilford’s Delta 400. This is a film I shot relatively little of and none in at least 5 years. In fact, I have shot very little T or Delta grain film in 400 speed, usually reserving that for Delta 100 or to a lesser degree, TMX/Tmax 100. In 400 speed black and white, I have always liked the traditional grained films with a lot of HP5+, TriX and Kentmere 400. I love the smoothness of TriX and the bite (if that makes any sense) of Hp5+. Kentmere is a fine budget film.

I have a couple rolls of Kodak TMY2 sitting around and I figured I would compare it to Ilford’s Delta 400 to see how I liked it. I have a bulk roll of TriX waiting to get used but after that, I was contemplating moving towards either Delta 400 or TMY2. So this led me to pick up a couple rolls of Delta 400 to compare with TMY2. I have yet to shoot Kodak’s t-grain 400 speed film recently (in the past) but plan on using those 2 rolls on next week’s National Park trip. I recently developed the delta 400 in my soup of choice, d76, and was pleasantly surprised. So much so I decided to write about it and post some images.

Initially, my impression is that the film has great range and tones. Very desirable and easily can be a substitute for traditional 100 speed film in 35mm format regarding grain size when needing a faster film. I have always found TriX grain very minimal, but the resolution suffers compared to 100 speed film. Ilfords Delta 400 seems comparable to any of the traditional grain 100 speed films, albeit with less contrast making it a better choice in contrasty natural light.

Camera and lenses on these two rolls are as follows: roll 1 was shot on a Minolta srt 102 with a rokkor 50/1.7 with and without an orange filter. Roll 2 was shot through a Nikon n90s with either a nikon 20/2.8 w/ orange filter and a nikon 28-80 zoom with yellow filter. I will post some results, first 3 images with the first roll and 2nd group of images with the 2nd roll. You be the judge.

Roll 2

So I will let the images and your eyes be the judge. Next up, in a couple weeks, will be the TMY2 images. Stay tuned…