Pushing for Monochrome Gold – Kentmere Pan 200 Take II

I last wrote about this film and trying it as a summer alternative to my usual HP5. It is safe to say, about a dozen rolls in, I am hooked on Kentmere pan 200.

For the summer months, I metered this at 100 and loved the results. Rolling into the colder months with less light, I wanted to do the opposite and test its versatility when pushing. Could this be a strong winter film pushing to 800? I bought a 100ft roll of this and went to town shooting and testing.

The great thing about a bulk roll is being able to do a “snip” test and not shoot through a whole roll. I made a couple 5-10 shot rolls to test pushing as well as my chemical mixture / develop times. In my last write up on Kentmere, there was not a lot of developing times out upon launch, so it was a bit of trial and error at first to lock down consistent look. Since that time, I switched from ilfosol 3 to HC-110 by Kodak for my developer, so back to testing.

Part of moving to HC-110 is the shelf life of the chemicals, but the other was around the quality and versatility in the mixture. My first test in developing Kentmere was solution B for 11 minutes, 1 minute of water as a stop bath and 5:30 of TF-5 fixer before rinsing.

I had 4 frames in my first test and this one made my jaw drop. The look completely blew me away for a budget 200 speed film being developed +2 stops. The grain was consistent and uniform, the blacks were strong while the highlights still had plenty of detail. The light fall off and grain on the latte cup is exactly what I was hoping for. It has texture, but is sharp and defined. This one image made me load up a full roll instead of a test roll and start shooting this formula more.

One thing I noticed over the summer with this film was how the highlights could glow and get this halation to them. I enjoyed the look, so it is no wonder it got more “glowy” when pushing this film. Kind of a unique property, but something to note with any flair or backlit situations. All the cool kids us halation filters now, so this is just the real thing.

In the next week, I managed to get through two more rolls and developed them this time, I did make just a small adjustment in my developing, but nothing crazy.

Kentmere pan 200 metered at 400 and developed at 800

-HC-110C solution B

-11:30 seconds developing (added 30 seconds from my snip test)

-1 minute water stop bath

-6 minutes TF-5 fixer (added an extra 30 seconds as the bottle recommends)

An 800 speed film is really universal and how I shoot my HP5. It can expose indoors while still giving plenty of room outside in bright lit scenarios. You can use that speed for everything. Being able to push this film 2 stops to achieve this, while getting consistent, strong results, is a win win. In the grand scheme of scheme of things, you do not save that much more vs HP5 per roll, but this bulk roll was $79 before shipping vs near $150 for the Ilford HP5. That is cutting the cost almost in half per roll which makes this very affordable in the film world.