I’ve been playing with more Japan Camera Hunter Street Pan 400 film and shot a scene that I always photograph just to compare what this film and Kodak Tri-X do when rendering a specific scene. Kodak Tri-X has been around for a while and is heavily loved by many photographers out there. But, it’s expensive and many photographers have looked for alternative options out there. One of the newer black and white films to hit the market is Japan Camera Hunter Street Pan 400 film.

So let’s take a quick look at Kodak Tri-X 400 vs Japan Camera Hunter Street Pan 400.

Just to be sincere here, this is an informal comparison and I’m not using loads of science, numbers, etc. None of that is romantic; and quite frankly that can take the romance out of photography.

In the image above the film was shot 35mm with the Hexar AF. This scene was shot with the Lomography LCA 120. Not a totally fair comparison here but we can see some key differences in the tonality and such. To be even more fair, the building in the back was shot years ago. It’s seen some wear and tear especially since Hurricane Sandy and all the snow that NYC gets.

In my opinion, these are both great films but neither of them is really giving me the look I personally want. I seriously digg high contrast film and these have high contrast for sure, but I think  I’ll need to work with a chromogenic film in order to get the looks that I want. I enjoy inky blacks so that the viewer’s eyes move immediately to the details clearly visible in the scene. It’s sort of like using color to compose a scene and is a very popular tactic overall.

If I have to pick one though, I prefer Kodak’s sharpness and Street Pan’s grain structure more. Both were developed with Rodinal to my knowledge.

I’m also starting to not really enjoy my Hexar AF’s metering system. We’ll be doing more of these in the future. And again: don’t take this uber seriously. It’s film–we have no need to become the cesspool that digital photography based forums and R/Photography has turned into.