Having shot a few rolls of what people recommend for starting out with film photography I decided to move onto something different and bought a roll of Harmon Phoenix II 200. I got the photos back today and my initial thought was I am just going to delete all of these, but I took a few minutes and looked at them from a distance and I didn't hate them all, but they came out pretty rough and I get why people recommend other film for starting out. If this was my first roll of film I shot I'd have thought I was shit at it and given up.

So why was that my reaction? For me the biggest reason was how off the colour balance was, the photos looked nothing like how I remember the days I shot these photos on. From reading up on other people's experiences and my own experiments with developing a negative this does seem to be more down to the photo lab than just the film. With the files I have there's still plenty I can do with the colours so after about an hour I had gotten the photos into a shape that I thought looked good at least.

With the white balance improved the other thing with this film is how it's so high contract & vibrant. There are some shots I took with pretty stark differences in light and they look particularly bad, the shadows come out really muddy but the highlights tend to be OK. The vibrancy I don't mind as much although it's not my usual style but the cap on it for me is the film grain—it's just so noisy! Sometimes you want this and while my initial thought was I'll never shoot with this film again I think there are scenarios it would be useful. If you are going for a really industrial gritty look I think it works very well.

Another aspect of it is that it's very sensitive when it comes to exposure. As I've said before I shoot entirely in manual mode on my EOS-1 because the light sensor seems to be off so I under-expose my shots. (I need to see if I can offset that, I probably can) One of my friends wanted to get a photo with me in it so I set it to aperture priority figuring it wouldn't be too bad, but it was a bit of a side by side comparison of how different being a little off on exposure changes this. It was also a super high contrast shot and the tiniest bit of shadow didn't hold up well hence the photo that I'm in looks washed out so I could manage to get my other friend to be visible in it.

I also got a roll of Kodak Gold 200 back, I spent about an hour fixing up the Phoenix photos and maybe 5 minutes on the Kodak Gold photos for an idea of the work in getting something I thought was worth sharing.

I was a bit dramatic with my initial reaction, there are some shots I do really like and it's a type of film I'd like to give another go some time. I think the Fuji Film 200 photos are still my favourite and it seems to work really well in the sort of light we have currently with so many sunny days so I'll probably shoot another roll of that next.

Here's a gallery of some of the ones I liked, you can see them all on my Flickr.