New Roll | Harman Phoenix II Film Review (Pt. 2)

Hello! I am here with something that is hopefully useful for everyone who shoots film.

A month(ish? idk time's not real) ago, I shot my first roll of Harman's newest color film stock, Phoenix II, in 120. I found it satisfying for the uniformly overcast lighting of the Glasgow Necropolis and the intense greens of Scotland's rolling hills, but I knew that was a relatively limited test, as the original Phoenix formulation's greatest weakness was in high-range situations.

Before I get into the film: you're looking at the Gorge Dam generating plant, located in Newhalem, Washington, a Seattle City Light company town built in the 1920s/30s exclusively to construct and maintain the three massive Seattle City Light dams of the Upper Cascades (Ross, Diablo, and Gorge). This dam and its two upstream siblings today collectively generate roughly a third of Seattle's electricity.

I visited when my wife and I drove up to Lake Diablo for a little boat ride hosted by Seattle City Light and the North Cascades Institute. (It was incredibly fun and I shot some of my favorite medium format of the year that day.)

Back to the film: I shot this at ISO 125 (rather than the advertised 200), as it's a 125-speed film. Companies love uprating their ISOs, I guess, because faster film is more commercially appealing (and easier to sell at a higher price)... and idk, "vibes". (Cinestill 800T comes to mind. It's ISO 500 when Kodak sells it as cine film, before Cinestill removes the remjet and respools it. The 800 rating is purely Cinestill making up a number so you feel more comfortable shooting it at night and underexposing it; you're not gaining almost an entire stop from removing the remjet!)

Other notes: developed normally, not pulled, and all scanned on my friend's Plustek 120 with Negative Lab Pro inversions basically hand-done on each frame by me (there is a reason it takes me so long to go through an eight-shot roll).

Anyway, it's hard to imagine putting this through a higher-contrast test than shooting into the sun in broad daylight. It's not Kodak stock, sure, but it's also... pretty solid?

Adjacent old-woman rant to expound on something from my last review of this film:

I am not a fan of "lomography" on the whole; although I absolutely love old film and old cameras, I think you should constantly be aiming for the best possible image from your gear, rather than intentionally trying to maximize retro-vibes with overly grainy/blown/halated shots. To this end, I cannot stand companies that build plastic garbage cameras and intentionally market it as a kitschy way to get images! You can get comparable shots from a $30 Kodak Brownie if you know what you're doing, and then you're recycling a perfectly good old camera vs. building some new plastic garbage!

And this also means I never buy intentionally lomo-styled film (looking at you, ORWO NC400). I want the image to be a record of what I actually saw, to some extent, which means that excessive grain or flat/ridiculous colors are a turnoff.

All of this is to say that I really don't think this is lomography-style film, even at the outer limits of its dynamic range, and I like it. The purple base layer and its narrow stops of range means Phoenix II is very stylized, sure. But I still think it has enough color information left on the negative to actually want to use it. The tint is not so overwhelming as to be uncorrectable with decent curves tweaks, and I think it's actually pretty pleasant on landscape shots.

(See above for what I mean; the purplish mountains and the utterly-maxed-out-highlights and totally-black-shadows really show the film's entire limitations and style in one photograph.)

I was honestly perfectly happy with these photos! I would buy another roll. (I have, actually.) I still haven't shot it in 35mm, where I'm sure the grain is a bit more of an issue, but shooting this stuff at 6x9 makes noise irrelevant.

Anyway I hope this was helpful if you're still on the fence about this stuff. It's pretty good and the results are fun.

Vicki <3