Ilford Ortho Plus
Looking for something different to put in your film camera? John Gilbey takes a look at Ilford’s unusual Ortho Plus film
First, a bit of history. Ilford’s Ortho Plus film is part of an imaging tradition that has its roots in Victorian times. While most monochrome films today are panchromatic, meaning they respond similarly to all colours of visible light, Ortho Plus is orthochromatic, and is not sensitive to red light. This makes it an interesting choice for the photographer who is looking for something a bit different.
The use of orthochromatic films started out as a necessity rather than a choice – it was effectively the only game in town. If you were in a pedantic mood, you might take issue with the term orthochromatic itself, as it comes from the Latin expression meaning ‘correct colour’, which is odd indeed for a film which ignores red light. Looked at from the perspective of the 1880s, however, we see that the range of colours that was captured by orthochromatic film counted as a marked improvement on that of the preceding emulsions, which only collected a very limited selection of wavelengths from the blue end of the visible spectrum. We can thank German chemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel – Berlin’s first Professor of Photography
– for developing the first orthochromatic dry plate.
Ortho vs pan
Ilford tells us that Ortho Plus was originally designed as a copy film. Specifically, it’s for getting clean copies of black and white documents, although this historic use as an archival material is clearly a very minor element of the current market. The emulsion design helped to remove ‘noise’ from the background of documents which were either black-on-white typescript or greyscale images. Today, it is marketed as an alternative film for landscape work and portraiture, where the lack of red sensitivity gives it some interesting possibilities.
The slow speed of the emulsion (ISO 80) helps make this film a good choice for capturing highresolution images, and if you have a dark red (but not orange) safelight, you could even develop the film in trays by observation. This might appeal especially to the large-format landscape photographer, as Ortho Plus is available in both 5x4in and 10x8in cut film sizes, with others available to special order.
Needless to say, you still need to be careful to avoid fogging the film, so the less exposure you give, even to ‘safe’ colours, the better. Ilford recommends a distance of at least 1.2m from a 15 Watt safelight fitted with a type 906 dark red filter. For those who want even more detail, the sensitivity of Ortho Plus effectively cuts off above a wavelength of around 560nm.
Field test
I started off with some table-top tests with a set of coloured crayons. This gave me a useful indication of how the respective colours are handled and guided my next moves. But no matter how much reading and research you do, or what desktop experiments you undertake, there is no substitute for testing a film under field conditions. I chose the first sunny day with a clear sky for my tests, so that I could see how various bright colours and a blue sky are rendered by
Ortho Plus. To find some winter colour, I headed down the coast to the seaside town of Aberaeron, where the harbour-side houses are painted in an engaging range of colours. In summer, yachts moored in the harbour would have added an additional colour palette, but in winter you can’t have everything.
I wanted to show both the image rendered by Ortho Plus and the ‘standard’ way you could expect to see the scene represented, and considered collecting these images on two different films. In the end, however, I decided to choose a DSLR to collect the reference images, as this will be the most familiar way of looking at the world for most photographers today. The Ortho Plus was exposed in a Nikon F5 with the ISO set to the box rating of 80, mostly using a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens. While my contact at Ilford Photo suggested I might like the additional effect offered by a yellow filter, I decided to keep the test as simple as possible and no filter was used. Some other images were collected with an AF-S Nikkor 70-300mm zoom.
The digital images were captured with a Nikon D800 with another Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens and AF-S Nikkor 70-300mm zoom. The colour rendering
was set to ‘Neutral’ to maintain as linear a profile as possible, while the reference monochrome versions were prepared in Photoshop using the ‘Remove Colour’ option.
Processing was done in a spiral tank using Ilford Ilfosol 3 developer diluted 1+9, an acetic acid-based stop bath and Ilford Rapid fixer diluted 1+4. Processing temperature was a standard 20 degrees Centigrade. If you are keen to experiment, the technical data sheet provided by Ilford offers timing suggestions for its whole range of film developers.
This combination gave bold, contrasty negatives with a very clear base. This scanned well with a Canon FS4000US film scanner and no adjustments were made – or needed – when importing them via Photoshop.
Results
For landscape work, the clarity, density and modest grain make Ortho Plus an interesting and trustworthy companion. The high contrast gives a pleasantly gritty image with a lot of impact, and I am trying to decide whether I try it in 120 roll film format next in my Bronica ETR-S, or whether to push the boat out and get a box of 5x4in for my MPP Mark 8. Either way, I feel a significant landscape project coming on. I am very tempted to return to the extreme landscapes of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah to capture some modern activities in the style, and with some of the constraints, of the early photographers who explored that region.
The way this film defines natural materials is interesting, with bare winter tree branches – for example – benefiting strongly from the extra punch and contrast that Ortho Plus provided when compared to a smoother panchromatic product. I was also pleasantly surprised by the ‘period look’ of Ilford Ortho Plus when capturing the Georgian buildings around the harbour at Aberaeron. If you were trying to reproduce how such a scene looked to late-Victorian photographers, then this film gives a very strong impression and does a lot of the work for you.
For portraiture, the lack of red information in the image gave me a different and striking view of the subject, but not necessarily a sympathetic one.
I will need a lot more practice with this film before I wholly trust it for portraiture, not least because of the high contrast it renders in some situations, even when the lighting seems to the eye to be moderately flat.
In both of these subject areas, Ortho Plus provides a very effective level of clarity and punch. With an ISO sensitivity of only 80 (reduced to 40 under tungsten lighting) you aren’t going to get far using it to freeze fast-moving sports or birds in flight, but equally the low speed makes it a good choice for long daylight exposures where you want to blur the passage of time.
‘The high contrast gives a pleasantly gritty image with a lot of impact’