FPP X-Ray

FPP X-Ray is medical imaging film hand-rolled onto 120 spools with backing paper and frame numbers added by the Film Photography Project crew in New Jersey. Mike Raso has been running the FPP since 2009 as a podcast and store for oddball emulsions, and this product is the most stubbornly odd thing in the catalog. The base is medical radiographic film sensitized for blue light and X-rays, repurposed for cameras instead of dental tubes.

The emulsion is orthochromatic, which means red light does not register. You can stand over the developing tray with a red safelight burning and watch the negative come up. Anything red in the scene goes black. Lips, brick, autumn leaves: all rendered as deep shadow. Skies pick up cleanly without a filter because they are blue. Skin tones go pale and slightly translucent in a way that reads as either Victorian portrait or horror film depending on the lighting.

There is no anti-halation backing. Highlights bloom around their edges. Specular reflections on chrome, a bulb in a lamp, sun through a window: each one halates outward in a soft diffusion that looks like nothing else in conventional B and W. That is also why the stock exhibits light-piping when loaded in daylight. Load in shade or a changing bag.

Rate it at 100 in even daylight. Push to 400 in flat light if you have to. D-76 stock for seven minutes at 68 Fahrenheit is the FPP-published baseline; Rodinal at 1:50 gives more bite and more grain. The closest peer is repurposed Kodak or Fuji green-sensitive medical sheets that large-format shooters cut down for 4x5, which behave more like a regular ortho film. This one is bluer.

FPP X-Ray 100 ships in 120 only, with proper backing paper. No 35mm exists.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 90 seconds at the negative. Long exposures with a film this strange are guesswork as much as math, so bracket if you have the patience.