Analog Therapy: Harman Phoenix 200 (Roll 2) – Konica Hexar RF – 7ARtisans 50mm f/1.1

With roll 2 I think I am getting my hands around Harman Phoenix 200. I have seen chatter about this film looking different in different photos. I did not dig too deep because comment sections are where the trolls do dwell. But I think I get it. I have theories about why this may be, but first an admission.

I edit my negative scans in Lightroom.

Most negatives only receive slight modifications. An exposure tweak here. A contrast tweak there. A twist and mild crop of the image over there. But I am not opposed (As in I do it all the time.) to more aggressive edits as well.

Some may take issue with adjusting negatives at all. Which is nonsense. What I do with my negatives should have no bearing on the personal preferences of another just as their preferences have no bearing on me. Could go on a ramble about darkroom edits made in the film days based on the photographers’ markups (Excellent post about it here.), but I will stick with do whatever floats your boat.

The admission here is that my edits go a little further with Harman Phoenix 200. The image as scanned has a red cast. Scan before edit below from my first roll.

And here is the image after hitting it with the Lightroom stick.

I am not surprised by this. They are a bit underexposed as well. What do I do in Lightroom? Mainly:

Auto exposure adjust.
Auto White Balance.
- This typically removes any red hues in the sky and restores the blues while retaining the red cast elsewhere that I really like.
I find turning up the clarity has a great impact as well.

May sound a bit much but this falls in line with the edits I do elsewhere. And most importantly this adjustment can be applied consistently so cut and paste works well.

At first, I thought the traits above may be tied to the camera used, but the same thing happened with the second roll. May adjust the camera’s exposure going forward, but in all honesty these negatives respond well to adjustments in Lightroom so this is an option, not a necessity.

Ok. The color shift or film looking different from pic to pic part. In short, the tint of and the amount of red in the image will appear different on the same roll of film. My theory? It seems to be related to the orientation of the sun. Shooting into the sun seems to bring about a different look than shooting away from it. Accurate? Not sure. But again, this is easy to adjust after the fact either way. There seems to be a difference from lens to lens also. The images below using the 7Artisans 50mm f/1.1 this time around seem to have more red in them than the first roll using the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM. Not better or worse. Just different.

In addition to colors I have noticed that the amount of grain can vary quite a bit from pic to pic. No Idea why. But I like it. The grain, when it does appear, looks good to my eye.

I leave the details of the film’s provenance to other posts and my initial post linked above.