Help! Advice for b/w film needed

[joelf]

Next year I´ll go on a eight months mountaineering trip through the Indian and Tibetan Himalaya. There won´t be much contact to professional photographic equipment supplies.

For many years I used Agfa Scala as the only film but for the Himalaya project I decided to also shoot b/w negs for later printing. Format will be 35mm shot on Olympus OM and Leica M hand held.
I do mainly portraits and landscape.

1. The ideal film would be an around 50-200 ASA -+2EV push/pullable film which could also be developed in a reversal process to b/w slides. I would be glad if the film could be a bit less steep than Scala. One sort of film would be ideal so I could just carry 100 Films and decide which to expose as slide and which as negs depending on the situation.
2. The other option is to take mainly Scala (there are still some fresh ones) and another film for negs.
Do You have recommendations for both options for film/dev combinations? I still have a few month to get used to the new material.

Thanks for Your input
Jochen

 

[3Dfan]

My experience with b/w is too limited to make any experience based suggestions, but when I wrote to DR5 labs with questions regarding what kind of ~100 speed b/w film to use for slides of a friend's wedding, I was basically told that Ilford FP4+ would be an ideal choice. There is a review of FP4+ as a slide film at http://www.dr5.com/fp4.html .

 

[joelf]

My experience with b/w is too limited to make any experience based suggestions, but when I wrote to DR5 labs with questions regarding what kind of ~100 speed b/w film to use for slides of a friend's wedding, I was basically told that Ilford FP4+ would be an ideal choice. There is a review of FP4+ as a slide film at http://www.dr5.com/fp4.html .

3Dfan, thanks for Your input. I tried dr5 with efke/adox 50 and rollei IR. The latter came out very nice, efke was rather disappointing but perhaps that was due to a technical error on my side? Support from dr wood is very helpful. But still it´s an expensive option. Developing alone would add up to 1300 USD. And I´d dependant on just ONE lab.

 

[Gerald Koch]

In order to get good B&W slides you really need a film with a colorless base. There are 6 Maco films that Maco says are suitable. See their website http://www.mahn.net

AFAIK, there is only one film now made specifically for reversal and that is Foma R100. This is an ISO 100 film with a colorless base and Foma publishes instructions on how to process it.

 

[reellis67]

Here is the link to FP4+ reversal processing if you want to do it yourself. They also recommend Pan F+ for stronger contrast, but that would not fit your film speed range as well as FP4+.

http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/20061291034093.pdf

- Randy

 

[AgCl4ever]

How about taking/ using only your regular, well-known-to-you reversal film, and then duping your chosen shots onto neg film for printing? If you are looking at, arbitrarily, printing 5% of your shots, it might be an option.