In May, I decided to stock up on all the film I thought I would shoot over the summer months, and so, imagining the sunny conditions ahead, I added a number of rolls of low ISO films to my shopping cart. As things turned out, this summer was so wet I didn't break out the first roll of Lomo Babylon 13 until the middle of September. The other day, I loaded a roll into the Nikkormat FTn with the 50mm f/2 attached. The meter on my Nikkormat is still working well after half a century and, believe it or not, it goes down all the way to ASA12. So, I was all set.
There are many reasons to choose these types of emulsions beyond just the fun factor, of course. Back in the day, photographers like Lewis Baltz were attracted to super slow films because of, among other things, their fine grain structure. This would allow them to achieve the larger print sizes associated with medium format gear using more compact 35mm cameras. Another reason to shoot with these films, a reason that is popular these days, is to facilitate the use of wider apertures under daylight conditions without having to use a neutral density filter.
I shot the silhouette of the mobile wide open at f/2 to get an idea about the out of focus rendering of the lens. Pretty okay, and similar to other lenses of that time period, I would say.
You can't judge a film on the basis of a single roll, hopefully the sunny conditions will hold for a while longer. But so far, there is not much to complain about here. The only real frustration was the high degree of curl to the negatives. It'll be fun to go out with other camera and lens combinations and see what happens.
