Film Photography News — January 2025 Recap

New Lens, New Film, HP5+ @ ISO 100,000, Four-Ish New Cameras, and a New App

9 min read by Dmitri.
Published on .

☞ This is the 70th monthly Analog.Cafe Newsletter with the latest film photography lore. Sign up to get it via email on the last Tuesday of every month (it’s free).

What’s new?

Since the last newsletter (sent all the way back in 2024!), about nine new things have launched or were promised to launch for us film photographers:

A fancy new Omnar M mount pancake lens, new cheap colour film, (maybe) four new film cameras — one of which is Fujifilm’s Instax WIDE Evo — two new gadgets from Reveni Labs, and a new chemical dilution calculator app.

I’ve also performed two experiments and shared detailed notes about drastically altering the sensitivity of a popular film stock.

💛 GOLD members get to read the entire Pushing Ilford HP5+ to ISO 100,000 and Pulling Ilford HP5+ to ISO 3 articles and learn about to “top-secret” project in this month’s newsletter.

🎁 Try GOLD free for 14 days! In this newsletter: What’s new? Shooting Ilford HP5+ at two extremes. Chemical dilution calculator. Fujifilm Instax WIDE Evo. The new 35mm 𝒇3.5 Omnar pancake lens. More film cameras? Reveni Labs’ new accessories. A new cheap colour film from China? Latest on Analog.Cafe. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Ilford HP5+ at ISO 100,000!

Shooting Ilford HP5+ at two extremes.

Last month’s newsletter had an easter egg:

The cover photo was made with Ilford HP5+ pulled seven stops and shot as if it were ISO 3 film stock. The hint was in the margins: the picture was signed cursively with the camera settings f/1.8, 1/60th.

Ilford HP5+ shot and developed as an ISO 3 film (pulled 7 stops). Hand-held at f/1.8 with a very reasonable 1/60s shutter.

The film responded so well to the extreme pull that no one seemed to have noticed anything odd about the image.

Pulling film seven stops is unheard of (I’ve looked), which means this is likely the most extreme experiment of its kind. This article shows various samples, explains the technique, and lists a few reasons why you may want to try that at home.

Though pulling HP5+ is relatively easy, pushing this (or any) film to the opposing extreme is much more challenging.

I shot and developed HP5+ as if it were an ISO 100,000 — another first in documented photochemistry. The initial few sets of exposures did not turn out — some frames were so mangled that they self-reversed (!) into extremely grainy positives — but after hours of calculations, tests, and with a more appropriate developer, pictures emerged.

I don’t recommend developing your HP5+ like that, but the method for time calculations and the developer selection described in the article can be applied to more reasonable projects that need fine grain and sensitivity extension beyond what’s listed in the Massive Dev Chart.

Chemical dilution calculator.

If you develop your black-and-white film at home, you may’ve come across various dilution instructions. They can be as simple as 1+100, where you can mix 1ml of chemical with 100ml of water — but that isn’t always the case.

The numbers can quickly get confusing with less friendly ratios and mixed measurement units. The equation for figuring out the amount of concentrate for a set volume of water is also somewhat nuanced:

x = (1/r) × (hx)

…Where x is the amount of chemical concentrate needed to make for a dilution 1+r, and h is the amount of water.

This can be a lot, especially when you’re busy managing your chemistry, tools, and film rolls all at once.

The new Dilution Calculator is made to make your job easier by taking care of all the math, converting to fluid ounces for those who need it, and cleverly rounding the numbers. The calculator is part of the Chem Log — a web app designed to help you manage your chemistry, track expiration times, and calculate development time extensions.

Fujifilm Instax WIDE Evo.

Fujifilm announced its new $349.95 instant film camera, which should be landing in stores within the next few days.

The company’s most expensive Instax camera to date features a 16mm 𝒇2.4 lens with a max shutter speed of 1/8000s that prints onto Fujifilm’s largest instant frame (99mm × 62mm or 3.9” × 2.44”).

Yet the most impressive spec of this camera is how slim and light it is for the size of the lens and the prints it produces: 139mm × 125mm × 63mm (5.5” × 4.9” × 2.5”) in 490g (17.3oz).

Usually, physics will prohibit these kinds of dimensions. The 16mm focal length is a full-frame equivalent, which would mean that to produce the same angle of view on Instax Wide, it would need to be a giant 40mm glass with an image circle bigger than that of a 6x9 medium format camera.

The only lens I could think of right now that would barely fit the spec is the Fujica 65mm 𝒇8 Fujinon-SW, which weighs 620g — 200 grams more than all of the WIDE Evo. Even then, its image circle may be insufficient and increasing the max aperture from 𝒇8 to 𝒇2.4 would mean the glass would be many times larger and heavier.

Fujifilm got some flack four years ago when they released their first Evo instant camera that printed on Instax Mini frames. It used a tiny 5MP digital sensor to capture the light and a built-in 318DPI light printer for the film. Its selling point was adding effects and being able to choose which image to print, but the specs made it seem a lot less interesting or powerful than other cameras with a true analogue path from lens to film.

The new Evo is promoted for the same reasons: digital effects on printed film. Using a camera as a printer with digital filter presets isn’t particularly exciting to me — lots of cameras do this, including most mobile devices. But the fact that Fujifilm used their technology to shrink this product from an impossible-to-carry large format-sized box to a flat, easy-to-hold gadget is both impressive and handy.

The new 35mm 𝒇3.5 Omnar pancake lens.

The Yashica T* point-and-shoot camera lenses are known to be sharp and full of character. I reviewed two of them on this blog: Yashica T5/Kyocera T-Proof and Yashica T2.

Last month, Hamish Gill of 35mmc (a prominent film photography blog) and Chris Andreyo of Skyllaney Opto-Mechanics announced their new, expertly rehoused T* 35mm 𝒇3.5 lens dubbed the Omnar Pantessa FLB:

The Omnar Pantessa also happens to be one of the smallest 35mm rangefinder lenses ever made with dedicated focus and aperture control rings as well as a front (E39) filter thread. Like a mechanical watch, the 35mm Pantessa has many complex and highly precise interlocking components that fit perfectly together in a package that, when mounted on a camera, is smaller than a typical rear M bayonet cap. It also weighs a mere 108 grams, and this is while maintaining an all-brass helicoid system to ensure the smoothest possible focus feel. The quality of construction we employ within our manufacturing processes also ensures that, with appropriate care, our lenses will last a lifetime and beyond.

This limited-edition (of 20) lens isn’t cheap (£1,950.00 or ~$2,425), yet it’s unique in both its form and function: the team engineered a floating-block solution that improves the existing optical performance. Pantessa also has a very large image circle that makes it usable on some medium format cameras.

You can learn more about the lens and see a few samples from various digital Leicas and medium format Hasselblad and Fujifilm cameras here.

More film cameras?

Smartflex is a lightweight, hand-held 4x5 SLR that exceeded its funding goals on Kickstarter and has already begun production.

Mania MFZ is a wooden multi-format, multi-focal-length, multi-pinhole camera system. This is the most-featured pinhole camera I’ve seen and the only system that lets you adjust focal lengths. Unfortunately, the project did not meet the funding goal and thus won’t be entering production.

Analogue aF-1 is an uncomfortably ambitious point-and-shoot camera project that promises a fast 𝒇2.8 lens with Lidar autofocus, a 1/1,000s shutter, and full automation in a compact body — all for €399/$412. Analogue promises to have it shipped this summer though there is still no prototype or images taken with the lens to be seen on their slick website. Given how difficult it is to create products like this, some people expressed their doubts.

Reveni Labs’ new accessories.

Reveni Labs is a small Canadian camera accessory manufacturer known for its light metering products. Their new LUMO meter is a relatively affordable ($140), compact, fully-featured incident and reflective light-metering device capable of working with modern flashes and producing a slew of helpful information on its colour TFT display.

The project has done very well on Kickstarter — and there are still 20+ days left for you to reserve one, if interested.

Reveni Labs’ other product isn’t as practical — a cheap rangefinder holder meant to replace the photographer’s ability to zone focus with a device that can shine a laser beam right into the subject’s eyeballs. While those beams are low-powered and are generally considered safe, I can’t imagine getting hit with one feeling cozy.

A new cheap colour film from China?

Though the details are sparse, a new colour film made at the Lucky Film factory is expected to become available this year. It will apparently be based on Kodak formulations (who licensed production to Lucky decades ago). It may become the cheapest colour negative film on the market, overshadowing Kodak ColorPlus (which, for some time, was cheaper than the cheapest black-and-white film).

I will share more with you in the coming months.