Harman Harman Phoenix 200 - Film Review

One of my least favorite stocks I’ve ever used. I shot 2 rolls on two cameras, from two different vendors, over a month apart, and I had my brother shoot another roll, also on a different camera, just to remove as many confounding variables as I could.

We’ve both shot hundreds of successful rolls, but with Phoenix we ended up with ~20 ‘keepers’ out of 110.Show more

The photos end up bizarrely oversaturated, yet shadows appear as voids – it has almost no latitude. When you do get a visible image, reds or maybe greens are 99% of the frames, with almost no other colors appearing.

I’m a fan of odd and interesting film stocks, but I don’t really enjoy almost entire rolls of completely unintelligible images.

And maybe I need more practice with it — I’ve heard/read the 120 stock behaves much nicer, but I haven’t been able to test it. Overall, I don’t think I’ll shell out money for Phoenix again.

I was very surprised at the results when this film was developed and scanned – some were good surprises and others were not ideal surprises. It gave a very surreal look to my photos. Some photos were with full sun on the beach and others were on a trail in contrast lighting. The full sun photos were interesting – the blue of the sky turned out VERY blue and the photos were very saturated. The photos of the trail, I was kind of disappointed with, but this could also be my failure to meter correctly. The shadows were very dark and the highlights were very bright – it gave the pictures an almost otherworldly effect, making you look really closely at the image to make out details. Some people may appreciate the look but it wasn’t really my favorite effect. All in all, a good film to experiment with and fun to shoot with. If you want the colors in your pictures to look more realistic, I’d reach for something different.Show more