Harman Phoenix 200 - A Funky-Fresh Color Film Made in the UK
My video overview of Phoenix 200. More details in the blog post below!
New Film, Who Dis?
It’s been a long time since I’ve decided to do a blog post documenting my experiences with a film, but I think this is a very worthy occasion. Just yesterday, December 1st, 2023, Harman Photo over in the UK launched their very first color film! That’s right, the folks that have brought us some of the film photography staples of HP5+, Multigrade Papers, Delta, XP2, and more are entering the color arena. Harman Phoenix 200 is a color negative, C-41 process film that’s unlike any fresh film I’ve ever shot.
Harman was kind enough to send out a little care package containing a slew of marketing knickknacks and most importantly two rolls of this new film. They provided a few notes for pre-launch users of the film like: ISO, where to process, suggested ISO range, and throughout their introduction letter kept mentioning that this is an experimental film. Users were to expect: high contrast in most lighting situations, heavy grain even when well-exposed, unique color rendering, and halation in the brightest highlight areas. At the time of testing, I wasn’t working with the depth of information that is out there now on this film like the official datasheet. Without much more to go on than that, I loaded up my trusty old Pentax K1000 with 50mm f/2 lens and headed out to a local park with Laur and our new Borzoi puppy, Echo.
For the entirety of this first roll of film, I still had no idea what the results would look like, even from other photographers! I wasn’t trying to take any crazy chances, so I shot this 200 ISO film at box speed, checking my Reveni Labs Incident Light Meter in between shots to make sure I wasn’t going too far over/under. I was also playing it safer than normal in terms of lighting, trying as much as possible to include some direct daylight in each shot. November afternoons don’t last long in Ohio, so the direct, blue sky sun quickly turned to an even, pastel sky during our mile-long hike at the park.
I didn’t manage to shoot all 36 exposures in that short hike, so with the remaining dozen or so shots I took a jog around downtown Columbus, OH the following afternoon. This time I was really aiming for as many direct sun compositions as possible to see how the film handled a standard 5-stop dynamic range scene as close to the color balance as possible. For many of the brightly lit scenes shot this way, I employed the use of my Promaster HGX 2-8 stop Variable ND filter to knock down the exposure to the limited shutter speed range of my K1000. Time to send off my test roll to The Darkroom, the official Harman Photo lab for the USA.
A Tale of Two Films
Not even 48 hours after receiving my order, The Darkroom had already processed, scanned, and uploaded my order to their online system for preview. I was excited, to say the least, that is until I took a look at the scans. Nearly every single shot had crunchy grain, crazy contrast, and an extreme orange + teal dual tone color cast. And if the main subject matter was even partially backlit, goodbye to those highlights (the worst three off of those scans shown below).
My initial excitement quickly faded to an uneasy stomach and mild anxiety as I waited for the negatives to arrive back from California. It was at this point that I started reaching out to other film shooters I knew that might also be testing out Harman 200. A few replied back with some quick examples and one even sent me some of their personal tips and tricks. Faith hadn’t fully been restored, but I was no longer losing sleep over the lab scans and waiting to see what the negatives had in store.
Only two days after leaving The Darkroom, a FedEx package was on my doorstep with my test film and to my surprise, THE NEGATIVES WERE PURPLE! Harman had mentioned “a surprise” that they didn’t want to spoil, but this was not something I was anticipating. Of course those automated lab scans were going to look weird, the film base didn’t even have the standard orange masking layer that helps with the daylight color balance! It was back to the drawing board with scanning my first roll, and below are the three very different renditions of the same exact negative.
This also serves as a cautionary tale those of you sending this out to a lab. Make sure the lab you’re using knows about Phoenix 200 and some of its quirks. There is full scanning compensation data available on Harman’s website as well as the official datasheet for photographers.
The first scan is what The Darkroom sent out for preview. the second scan was done with my Epson V700 scanner in “Auto Correct”, and the third scan was with manual inversion. To manually invert the negative, it’s a pretty drawn-out process for a single frame, but gives you access to the full range the film has to offer. On a scanner like the V700, you have to go into the Configuration menu of Professional Mode and Disable Color Correction and also scan color negatives as Color Positive. From there, the positive scan is manually inverted using Adjustment Curves and Camera RAW Filters in Photoshop.
Was all of the extra effort worth it? If you like and of the photographs in the gallery at the top of this blog post, or any of the cooler-to-neutral looking photos in the galleries below, I’d say it’s worth it! Personally, my favorite look is somewhere between Epson’s Auto Color setting and the expired Ektachrome look of the manually inverted negatives. Sometimes the super-retro vibes of the warm + cyan look can work, but other times I’d like to see some more fleshed out blues, reds, and greens.
To the Studio!
By this time in my limited film test, I was a bit more hopeful about Harman Phoenix 200, but still wanted to try it out in a more controlled environment. With only a few days until the December 1st launch date, I called up my buddy Tariq Tarey to see if he was up for a quick studio shoot. If you’re not familiar with Tariq’s work, you should be. He’s an absolute master of portraiture, and his technical skill with light and cameras is only outdone by his charming personality.
Knowing a bit more about the contrasty nature of Phoenix 200 firsthand, I gave Tariq the heads-up that we would need to be working with a very tight lighting ratio. I suggested something close to a 1:1 ratio, meaning that the key/main light and any fill light hitting the subject was to be at the same intensity. With modern films and/or digital cameras this look often feels “flat” and sometimes even boring. Harman’s experimental color film managed to eek some drama out of an ordinarily lit scene.
Pictured above you can see the results of a simple 5-shot bracket with the Sekonic Exposure Profile Target. Metered for the box speed of ISO 200, the shots are in order of Exposure Values: -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2. Now I can see why Harman kept mentioning that this wasn’t a film meant for pushing! This film packs some contrast, even in flat light with a simple greyscale chart. There were two big surprises in this test. First off was the blown highlights; only the EV -1 and -2 had highlights that weren’t showing significant magenta halation; this film has a mild anti-halation layer compared to other color films on the market. The second surprise was that the EV 0 exposure, essentially ISO 200, looked more like one would expect from an underexposed chart (looks about 2/3 stop under IMO). Overall I found the colors rather pleasing in the overexposed charts (essentially ISO 50 & 100), so I’d recommend rating Harman Phoenix 200 somewhere around ISO 100 - 125. This feels like a film that would pull process well, so more testing to do on that front when I purchase some more.
But enough about grey boxes and a still life, how does this higher contrast film translate to a sitting subject in the studio? Well Tariq and I had the better part of 24 exposures to mess around with in that same lighting setup, and we each tried a few poses with each other as the model. That light coming in from camera-left in the portraits is only 1/2 stop over the the key light, something big to keep in mind when working with subjects with deep-set eyes (like yours truly!). Fill, fill, fill. If you’re shooting portraits with this film, do it in dead-even light and bring that bounce card or fill light in annoyingly close to make sure you get something in those shadows. Phoenix 200 is about as forgiving in the shadows as expired slide film, meaning if it’s not there at the time of exposure, the only thing that will be there after processing is grain.
Closing Thoughts
Phoenix 200 is everything Harman said it would be in their FAQ sent out to testers, I just wish they would have sent out more data (more film wouldn’t have hurt either!). Thanks to a great contact in the industry, I was able to obtain a digital copy of the film’s datasheet < 24 hours before launch day and releasing an overview video on the subject. My personal gripes with Harman’s marketing aside, this is a film that is going to be polarizing. Within the first day of launch there are already reports of retailers worldwide already running out of stock, while online many are flocking to the comments section to rail on the fact that this film isn’t God’s gift to photography. There’s no way that a brand new color film (made in just this past year!) is going to beat the nearly 100 year lead that Kodak has perfected over countless iterations. And to be perfectly honest, we don’t need another Portra. If we want something unique, and if the film community truly wants innovation, THIS is how it starts.
If you’d like to pick up a few rolls to support the industry in a positive direction, I’d recommend checking out your local camera shop, wherever Ilford and Harman products are sold. For the convenience of shopping online, there’s no better place I know of than The Film Photography Store. My buddy Michael Raso over at The Film Photography Project is offering a special discount of $1 off of each roll of Harman Phoenix 200 color film that you order. Simply use coupon code “LFF” during checkout; the deal ends December 15th, 2023.
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