SFX 200 Adventures

I make no secret of being rather fond of Ilford film – Ilford XP2 Super was what got me into black and white. When the friendly British giant went into receivership in 2004 they cancelled the SFX200 line, but it was brought back into production in 2007 due to public demand. Now and then listening to your customers pays off, and it’s reintroduction has been a great success. With Kodak withdrawing it’s Infrared film (HIE) from the market it’s the last IR film from a big player left in the game.
Now, despite this, C.R. Kennedy (The distributor for Ilford products in Australia) apparently doesn’t deem there to be enough demand to actually import it into Australia. This has happened in the past, and as Ilford doesn’t control their foreign distributors it’s up to the consumers to register their demand. [UPDATE: SFX200 has apparently made it to Australia, see [here]]

You can find C.R. Kennedy’s website here: crkennedy.com.au
If you feel like pestering them.

In the mean time, you can buy the film from Freestyle Photo in California, and they’ll ship it to you in Australia in about a week. It’s expensive, and so is shipping, but for the time being that’s how it goes.

In my case, I was lucky enough to get some off eBay Australia, from a seller who’d apparently followed the above method and sold it at a profit. A large one. Worked out to about $18 a roll for 5 rolls.

I’m also a big fan of eBay (most of the time), so once I’d gotten the film I bought a Hoya R72 filter from a seller in china.

Now!
A week and a bit later it all arived and I’ve had a chance to play around, and here are some of the results.
Still need to be printed up properly, but some RC paper is on the shopping list for this Tuesday.

Technical:
Nikon FM2n, 50mm f/1.8 Series E + Hoya R72
Canon EOS 1, 50mm f/1.8 II + Hoya R72

Just going by the TTL meter got the exposure pretty close – but it seemed to overexpose every time there was a lot of foliage in frame. Makes sense, foliage reflects a lot of infrared light – something to remember.