I recently shot through my first roll of Ilford Delta 3200, not knowing what I would have to expect. I had been using Fuji Neopan 1600 as my dedicated fast film before and loved it. Sadly, the film is no longer available. So I bought a roll of Delta 3200 and Kodak T-Max 3200 each, to see which I would go with. To make it short: Delta 3200 is fantastic. Wonderful tonality, great colour sensitivity, and rather unobtrusive grain for such a high speed film (though definitely noticeable.) I will shoot the one roll of TMZ just to see what it’s like, but I have little doubt that I’m going to go with Delta 3200 whenever I need a really fast film.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded some samples to flickr, so please take a look by clicking on the image below.

I think this picture of my little brother is exemplary for the awesomeness of Delta 3200.

A little back story: I was shooting the roll of Delta 3200 in my Leica CL over the holidays, mostly on the inside, though I took two pictures in daylight (at f/11 or f/16, I believe, even though it was overcast and dreary). When I shot the last frame, I put a bit too much force on the advance lever (not having looked at the film counter and thus unaware that the film was ending there) and ripped the film out of its canister. I quickly darkened the room and tried to get it back into the canister, without success. So I decided to simply wrap the film around the canister and put it into an opened 120 film wrapping, in which to my surprise it just fit. I sealed it off and sent it to the lab with a not as to what had happened, so they wouldn’t open it up in a lit room.

Needless to say, many of the pictures had some minor or major light streaks, but the lab handled it very well and most of the pictures came out somewhat usable. So what did I learn from this experience? 1) Delta 3200 is really sensitive! The smalles amount of unwanted light hitting the film may ruin your pictures! And 2) In the future I will be much more careful when advancing film in my Leica CL — especially when the counter has already hit the ’36’ mark …