5 frames with JCH Street Pan 400

Note: The photos here have not been edited and are directly as scanned.

On a hot and sunny Deepavali day (6 November 2018), a few of my closest friends and I went to Petaling Street to grab breakfast. An ad-hoc get-together is not something we get to do together as a group often these days, with everyone busy with their respective lives. 

I immediately packed my bag with my Nikon 28ti and also the Nikon S3 which had just arrived. In the 28ti, I loaded with a roll of JCH Street Pan 400. It was a film stock which I've been wanting to test out, and in the S3 was the Kodak ProImage 100 film stock. The idea of pairing the JCH Street Pan 400 with the point-and-shoot Nikon 28ti was it would require less tinkling and thus faster for a street photography experiment.

It took me quite a while to finish shooting all 36 frames of the JCH Street Pan 400 and I can say that it taught me quite a few things (especially since I have very limited experience with black and white photography).

The 1 most important point that stood out to me, using this film stock, is that the shadows can be very unforgiving. As much as I had tried to frame the photos and meter for the shadows, shooting with this film requires a camera that allows more manual controls. Shooting on aperture priority mode with flash turned off, as I had done for most of the pictures on this roll meant that there was a lot of details in the shadows that are lost. That said, highlights are not overblown even in the brightest of settings (see the bonus picture (last image on this post) that was shot with flash on). 

The second point I noticed most about this particular film stock is how smooth the images turn out. The grain level is very pleasing to the eyes, unlike my experience with the Ilford HP4, which was very grainy in comparison to the JCH Street Pan 400. 

 All eyes are on my dear friend, Jules, in the picture above.

Perhaps that is true of shooting black and white photography, being that it is almost necessary to have full functional control over all aspects of the process on camera in order to produce the best results on film, so a point-and-shoot like the Nikon 28ti may not have been the best pairing with the JCH Street Pan. 

All said and done, this is certainly a film stock that I will not hesitate to use again but on a camera that allows for more manual controls. I shall try it out next with my Nikon FE, which has been sort of neglected of late since the Nikon S3 has arrived. 

Here's the bonus frame of my buddy, Dirty Dave, which was shot with flash mode on.