Favourite Fast Film

[Cliffy13]

Saw a thread about your favourite slow film so I thought would go to the other extreme and extol the virtues of Fuji 800 print film,I used versions of this in my film only days and now that I have returned to use film alongsiode digital I have tried the latest incarnation.It is a gorgeous as ever beautifully saturated colours and almost grain free,pity I cant get the same quality at 800 out of my 350D

[markbarendt]

I'm not much in slow films but 800z is way cool.

[perkeleellinen]

Fuji 800Z here too.

[phaedrus]

Fuji Superia 1600 (at an E.I. of 1000) for colour negative, because I like a bit of grain and the pastel colours.
Fuji Neopan 1600 (box speed, X-TOL) for the rich blacks.

[perkeleellinen]

Ooh, if we're opening this to B&W also then I'm also a fan of Neo1600.

I should add that I think Superia 800 has a bit less grain than 800Z but Superia does exaggerate ruddy skin. My friends are not models so the more flattering 800Z works well for that, for non-human stuff I think Superia is hard to beat. But 800Z is currently cheaper than Superia 800 in the UK.

[Jeff Kubach]

I like T-Max 3200 for the grainy look.

Jeff

[Tim Gray]

I love Portra 800. Great stuff.

[accozzaglia]

With exception to perhaps Fujichrome Provia 400X for colour, using Ilford Delta 3200 for black and white, and pushing Ilford HP5+ to 1600 (which I practically always do with it), all the fast films I love are now finito, dead, gone, sad:

The casualty list:
Fujichrome MS100/1000 (the Ginsu of chromes, replaced by the spendier 400X)
Ektachrome EPJ 320T (can push by 2 stops with positively wonderful grain)
Ektachrome EPT 160T (can also push 2 stops without it imploding)
Konica SR-G 3200 (one of a kind, long dead)

[Stephen Frizza]

Scotch 1000, Agfa Rs1000, or Kodak GPZ 1000.

[accozzaglia]

Scotch 1000, Agfa Rs1000, or Kodak GPZ 1000.

I always, always, always wanted to try Scotchchrome 1000 after seeing the work of Jody Dole back in the 1990s. He made use of it after buying the stuff from a clearance display at a local pharmacy. This was back in 1988 or 1989, I think. After seeing how the results turned out from his experimentation, he was smitten enough to go back and just clear out the pharmacy of their supply entirely, sticking this bounty into a chest freezer for future client work. This, plus samples of his work, was in a Communication Arts interview from May 1997.

Perhaps the best known of these client ventures was the Smirnoff account in the early 1990s. It won advertising awards in large part to the painterly quality of the emulsion. That was when I fell in love with high-grain chrome photography. With some irony, the only place where I can find an example of this work online these days is on Apple's Aperture web page. Nowhere on there does it note that the main photo (plus the Graphis Photo 89 cover shown as inset, though please don't quote me on that one) was shot with Scotchchrome 1000.