FP4 Plus

FP4 Plus is the middle of black and white film. At 125 speed it is fast enough for daylight in the hand and slow enough for very fine grain, and it uses traditional cubic crystals rather than tabular ones, so it looks like film rather than like a clean scan.

It is also the stock that forgives. Ilford publishes development times from EI 50 to EI 400 for it, and a negative exposed a stop either side of the meter still prints. That combination of fine grain and wide latitude is why it survives as the general purpose choice.

Ask for very fine even grain. Even is the word that separates it from Tri-X: the grain is regular across the frame instead of clumping in the midtones, and it is visible only at a large print size.

Skin comes back as a natural mid grey with its texture held. The medium contrast keeps the shadow side of a face readable, and the fine grain leaves the skin surface alone. It is the closest thing on this list to a neutral rendering of a person.

Say what the sky is doing, because it is the one place the stock can look wrong. Without a filter a blue sky prints near white and clouds vanish into it. A yellow filter brings it to mid grey, an orange filter goes darker, and a red filter makes it almost black. For speed, FP4 Plus pushes to 400 at a stretch, and that is not what it is for.

Use it for daylight landscape, architecture, still life and portraits in good light. Use it in the larger formats, where its fine grain and the size of the negative give a print with no visible structure at all.

Leave it alone indoors and at night. At 125 speed it forces a slow shutter, and asking for FP4 Plus and a handheld night picture in the same prompt gives a contradiction the model resolves badly.

HP5 Plus is the same family a stop and a half faster, with more grain and less bite. Pan F Plus 50 is the same family slower, finer and much harder in contrast. FP4 Plus sits between the two and takes a little from each.

Cinema publishes Monochrome and High Contrast at /techniques/cinema/ as grades on a finished picture. FP4 Plus is the opposite kind of decision. It sets a medium contrast tone curve in the negative itself, and a grade applied afterwards cannot put back the mid greys that a harder stock never recorded.

The Ilford FP line dates from 1935, FP4 arrived in 1968 and FP4 Plus replaced it in 1990 with a finer grain and a longer straight line. Ilford sells it in 35mm, 120 and sheet film, and once a year it cuts ultra large format sheets to order, which is how 8x10 and larger photographers still get it. It remains the default choice for daylight landscape work on sheet film.

The result reads flat and dull, because a neutral stock plus a neutral prompt gives a neutral picture. Say medium contrast with full mid greys, and describe the light: low sun, a bright overcast sky, a window.

The colour to grey trap shows up in the landscape. A blue sky prints near white and a red flower or a red roof prints near black, because the film records blue as bright and red as dark. Name the filter you want on the sky, and expect warm colours to come back dark.