Rollei Retro 80S is a slow speed, fine grain, high contrast panchromatic black and white film with extended red sensitivity stretching into the infrared range.
It’s also comparatively cheap, though likely unavailable at most local shops (I ordered mine online from B&H).
Due to its fine grain and red sensitivity, which makes skin look smoother and hides blemishes, this film is considered ideal for portrait photography. Its unusual sensitivity to infrared light can be taken advantage of by using a red filter to block blue and green light, or by using an infrared filter and over-exposing the film for a true infrared effect.
I didn’t take advantage of any of that.
Instead, I shot it as I would any black and white film, at box speed and with no corrective filters over the course of two months, from February to April. Shooting locations took me across Alberta from Drumheller in the east to Lake Louise in the west, with subjects from back alleys to mountain ranges to geese on the river.
Even without using the film to its full potential, I was very happy with the results. Its high contrast is evident when comparing it to a similar photo I took on Fomapan 100, at the same location on the same day only a few hours apart:
Regardless of subject, this film handled itself admirably. The high contrast, sharp blacks and whites were the perfect remedy to the grey-and-brown colours of winter (which, in Alberta, persist well into May). I was especially captivated by how it captured the texture of rippling water and the trees and birds reflected in it.
Here are a handful of the photos I shot using the Rollei Retro 80S:
A note on processing (developing, scanning, and printing)
I developed the film as per the Digital Truth Massive Dev Chart, using a 1+1 developing solution of Kodak D-76 for 12.5 minutes with 15 seconds of agitation every minute for the first three minutes and a single inversion every three minutes after that. This yielded beautiful negatives, though with an unusually clear and thin emulsion:
The nature of the emulsion caused difficulties during both scanning and printing. If you’re the type who likes to scan in your own negatives, be prepared to spend an extended amount of time fiddling with the scanner in order to get it to properly see the negative. Depending on your software, the colours will likely be rendered incorrectly, requiring some additional post-processing work:
Whether due to the ultra-high contrast of the film, the thin emulsion, or both, this film proved extremely difficult to print with a very narrow dynamic range. The first two test strips I printed came out completely black (overexposed) while the third came out completely white (underexposed). By the fourth and fifth tries I was getting some semblance of an image, but it took a significant amount of trial and error, time, and hair-pulling before I finally came up with the idea to perform an experiment using coloured filters:
Perhaps more so than other films, Rollei Retro 80S responds to coloured filters, with the red filter resulting in no image being exposed, the blue and yellow resulting in a high- and low-contrast print respectively, and the green resulting in something in between.
Thereafter, I used a blue filter and short exposure intervals (approx. 2 seconds) when determining the right exposure times for these negatives, and was able to develop several prints I was happy with:
This film provides a unique look impossible to recreate with other panchromatic black and white films on the market, while still being cheap. Its challenges can be overcome with a bit of trial and error (and patience); I look forward to shooting it again and taking true advantage of its unique characteristics.