What surprised me the most about this one is that there is no listed time for Delta 400 and Diafine. But not every film can respond to Diafine, which is okay. Delta 400 isn’t my personal favourite film either, but I’m working hard to find a method that gives me the results I enjoy. After getting good results with Tmax 400 and fine results with Delta 100, my hopes were high going into this to see if Delta 400 lived up to some of the things I’ve seen online!
Film Specs
Manufacturer: Ilford
Name: Delta 400
Type: Panchromatic B&W
Film Base: Acetate
Film Speed: ASA-400
Formats Available: 135, 120, Sheets
For this roll, I used ASA-400 (box speed) as my benchmark, then shot it between -2 and +2 stops, which translates to ASA-100 to ASA-1600. There are no combinations through the Massive Dev Chart for this combination, there were some examples on Flickr but a lot of them did not include the times (now you see why I include my times/dilutions). One stood out, a 4+4 combination with the film rated at ASA-800. Another website saw good results with a wide +/- 3-Stop spread, but no times were listed. So I ended up landing on a 4+4 time, why? I honestly am trusting my gut on this one. I went with my Nikon F5 and the 28mm f/2.8 lens with the aperture set to f/x. Then I used the EV adjustment control to move between -2 and +2 using a remote release.
Despite having so many different times available to me in my early investigations, I’m happy I settled on the 4+4 time I used. The negatives had a good spread between the extreme ends but nothing too serious. At the +/- 2-stop sides, the frames look either very thin or very dense, and the centre three frames are fairly consistent, which is what I’m used to at this point in the project. But there isn’t too much difference between all of them, at least to my eye. I’m sure that a densitometer would tell me exactly the difference between everything. No matter, I’m good with how the negatives turned out.
The scans ended up being far better than I expected. I expected good results, but not this good. And I’ll admit, I had lower expectations for the Delta 400. But overall, all five frames were good, and while the underexposed and at-box-speed frames are the strongest in the group, the overexposed frames are still recoverable with some post-processing. The Box and 1-stop under are the best, in my view; in fact, the 1-stop under is my personal favourite of the batch and gives me another combination to make Delta 400 look good to me. In all cases, the frames have great grain rendering and are still sharp across the board.
As I mentioned, Delta 400 has never been my favourite; I’ve always preferred TMax 400 or something in the traditional grain category. But I think it will be a good idea to give it that boost in speed up to 800, or between 400-800 and even a bit over and develop it in either Diafine or another contrast-boosting, compensating developer. The best part is that Delta 400 is less expensive than TMax 400 these days, so I can figure out something that makes a film stock more usable for me (and hopefully you).