FPP Blue Sensitive

FPP Blue Sensitive is a 35mm version of the old Svema blue-sensitive master roll, repackaged by the Film Photography Project from Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The base is lavender plastic, which is the visual giveaway. The emulsion responds only to the blue and ultraviolet end of the spectrum, roughly 450 to 500 nanometers. It does not see red, orange, yellow, or most green. A yellow filter is pointless. A red filter is destructive.

This is not a portrait film. Blue-sensitive emulsions render skin tones the way you would expect from something that ignores half the spectrum: dark, blotchy, no useful subtlety. What it does well is sky and water rendering. Foliage comes back almost black because chlorophyll reflects strongly in the green and red the film cannot see. The look is closer to a glass-plate photograph from the 1880s than to anything from the panchromatic era that took over in the 1920s.

Box speed is ISO 6, extraordinarily slow by modern standards. The FPP recommendation for cameras that cannot dial in single-digit ISO is to set the meter to 25 and open two full stops. In broad sun at f/16 you are at roughly 1/8 second; in open shade you are immediately into tripod territory. Flash works because the burst overwhelms the daylight calculation.

FPP recommends D96 at 7 minutes 30 seconds at 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Rodinal 1:50 also works and gives a punchier rendering. Compared with Eastman 2366, the other widely-available blue-sensitive at similar ISO, the Svema-derived FPP stock tends toward lower contrast and a creamier highlight rolloff.

Available in 24-exposure 35mm and 100-foot bulk rolls through the FPP store. No 120 or sheet film at this writing.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve. A 10-second meter reading runs to about 21 seconds at the negative; a 30-second exposure climbs to roughly 89 seconds. At ISO 6 in anything less than full sun, the one-second threshold comes up almost immediately.