My First Time Shooting Rollei Superpan 200

I've somewhat given up on my search for an ISO 100 film that I love, although I recall liking both T-max 100 and Acros 100 (can you even buy that anymore?), I'll retry them both soon I think. It seems like all the higher, or at least not slower films pale in comparison to my favorite very slow films. Maybe that's just the physics of it and I need to get over it, but not yet.

The other day I stumbled on some images taken with Rollei Superpan 200 and they looked quite good. Not super contrasty, but contrasty enough. I thought I could use filters to increase the contrast as necessary and that maybe sans filters it would be a good film for those overcast days that we seem to be getting a lot these days? As I understand it Superpan is a descendant of Agfa Scala 200 and is actually Agfa Aviphot 200 an aerial surveilance film. I definitely have an affinity for several of the Agfa films (RPX-25 is among my favorite films. I think it's an Afga film?) so I thought it might be worth a try.

Yesterday I had a doctor appointment on the south end of town and it was an unusually sunny and pleasant day, especially for the way this winter has been going. I loaded the Leica Ic with one of the rolls of Superpan that had just arrived and put on the Voigtlander (Cosina) Color Skopar 21mm lens with and orange No.21 (2 stop) filter. There was enough light on that day that shooting at the equivalent of ISO 50 would be a piece of cake.

Below are the shots from my trip back and forth to the doc. I have another few shots that are much lower contrast, wherein I used a yellow filter on a cloudy day. This film is too new to me for me to have much of an opinion on it. My initial impression though is quite positive. It's not near grainless as my favored low speed films are, but the grain has a really even, to my eyes, quite pretty quality. It's certainly not the sharpest film in the world either, but it's sharp enough so that it's lack of acuity doesn't detract from the images (or so it seems to me). The exposure lattitude seems decent and the contrast (with filter) is also quite good. I processed this roll in Adox FX-39 for 13 minutes, but the next roll I'll process in Kompostinol, that's a developer that T-max at least certainly doesn't get along with. Oh, one thing that's a nice bonus about this film is that it lies dead flat for scanning. A pleasant plus!