Response to Ilford's New Delta 400

I've been using TMY for a lot of years. Some of my best photographs ever have been made using it. In the last couple of years it seems some of my worst photographs have resulted from its use. Maybe its me. I don't know. I haven't found a satisfactory answer. For years I rated it at 200 and developed it in HC110. When Xtol came along I tried that. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it wasn't. The film seemed to exhibit more grain that it used to. And the grain wasn't sharp and well defined. And the negatives seemed to render dull and flat looking prints. I began looking for something else and went back to an old standby - FP4 and ID11. The results were great. The problem is that I liked that extra stop of film speed with TMY (I rate FP4 at 100, TMY at 200 or 250)and TMY was capable of providing extremely fine grain at one time - certainly no worse than FP4. I was in Scotland last year and on the whole was disappointed with my photograps which were all on TMY. This year I resolved to take my old standby FP4 as my main film and threw a little faster stuff in just in case. The faster stuff was called for more than not and as I mentioned earlier the new Delta 400 performed beautifully. The TMY did not - again. The results are dull and lacking contrast. The problem with TMY is that it doesn't seem to handle high contrast well and so there is a tendency to be stingy with development - especially with roll film where you can run the gamut of subject brightness ranges on 1 roll. The Delta 400 negatives printed easily despite the large contrast range in the cathedrals. Shadow detail was excellent. I suspect that rating it a 250 was a little on the low side - 400 is probably more like it, but the shadow detail was so good I may leave it at 250. We'll see. All of my film was developed 1:1 in ID11. I think sometimes that if you accidentally get a fim and developer to work right off the bat, maybe you should stick to it. I'm not a guy for a lot of testing. I'd rather just take pictures and leave the tests to the rest of you.

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