This is my film shelf. You may notice that I have a strong preference for a certain film stock:

Ilford Delta has been my go-to film ever since I started shooting black-and-white. It’s incredibly sharp, and I think its grain structure plays well with the gritty things I like to capture. Delta 100 can render an unbelievable amount of detail, even by the standards of the digital age. It’s the only 35mm film stock I trust for large prints. Delta 400 isn’t far off in the detail department, and it’s fast enough that you don’t have to worry about a tripod.

But, there’s always too much of a good thing. Over last summer, I shot 7 or 8 rolls of Delta in a row. Although I got good photos out of every roll, things started to get repetitive. I felt like I was getting into a creative rut, and I didn’t want to get stuck.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I bought some dank Ukranian film from someone on Discord.

This is Svema Foto 100, or Свема фото 100 in its mother tongue. This ISO 100, infrared-sensitive black-and-white film stock is allegedly produced in Shostka, Ukraine. As you can clearly see, this is professional-grade stuff reserved for the most sophisticated of photographers:

Hand-spooling 35mm film isn’t easy, and the guy from Discord actually did a really good job. I just think the masking tape is funny.

The Film Itself

Foto 100 is weird stuff. Here is a strip of Foto 100 (second row) along some more common film stocks:

Side note: on my calibrated IPS monitor, the film strips above all look wildly different. On my washed-out ThinkPad screen, the differences aren’t as obvious.

Most black-and-white film stocks are varying shades of translucent grayish-purple, like the two Ilford strips shown in the picture above. Foto 100 is perfectly transparent. That’s odd, but not unheard of. Note how the strip of Rollei Infrared (bottom row in the above photo) is also transparent.

Foto 100 is new to me, but I have been shooting Rollei Infrared for years. I shoot Rollei Infrared exclusively for its namesake feature: infrared sensitivity. I don’t like it for any other purpose.

At a glance, Foto 100 has a lot in common with Rollei Infrared. Besides the transparent substrate, both films lack DX barcodes (those stripes along the bottom edge of the Ilford film strips). This is weird, because DX markings have been standard fare for decades. At least the Rollei film is labeled with its name and some helpful alignment marks; Foto 100 is completely blank, besides my pictures!

Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared have another thing in common: they both bear the names of European photo brands with mind-numbing histories of bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions. This will become important later.

You’ll have to take my word on this, but the Rollei Infrared and Foto 100 strips feel delicate, like plasticky tissue paper. That’s because they’re made out of cellulose acetate. Cellulose acetate film was introduced in the early 1900s. It was marketed as “safety film” to distinguish it from then-standard nitrocellulose film, which had a tendency to violently burst into flames. However, cellulose acetate was replaced by polyester decades ago, so it’s strange that both Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared use cellulose acetate.

Today, nearly all photographic film is manufactured on polyester, but cellulose acetate still has a niche in motion picture film. I’m not sure why. Wikipedia says the fragile acetate substrate ensures that, when (not if) your expensive cinema camera jams up, the camera will destroy the film, and not the other way around; citation needed, but it’s an interesting thought.

My hands are accustomed to modern polyester film, so handling these cellulose acetate stocks during development is an unnerving experience. You can manhandle polyester film a bit, but Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared feel like they’d tear in half if you look at them the wrong way.

Seeing Infrared

Rollei Infrared and Foto 100 share one more uncommon trait. Both film stocks are sensitive to infrared light. More specifically, these film stocks are sensitive to the “Near Infrared” (NIR) range, which is the band of IR light that’s close to, but not quite within the visible spectrum.

NIR-sensitive film allows for some fascinating visual effects when you use an “R72” infrared lens filter, like this one. It looks opaque, but this lens filter is actually transparent to 720nm infrared light:

Although 720nm is indeed infrared, it’s relatively close to the deep-red end of the visible spectrum. If you hold this filter up to the sun, you can make out a teeny bit of red light coming through. It’s not much, though.

Here’s a photo taken on Foto 100 without the IR filter:

The sky is an indistinct blend of white and light-gray poofs. Here’s the same shot, taken with an IR filter:

The clouds are still the brightest part of the image, but the sky behind the clouds has gone very dark. As a result, the IR photo allows you to see the complex cloud texture that was invisible in the original photo, and invisible to my own eyes while I was taking these photos. The added contrast brings out some leading lines in the clouds, with a little help from the ultrawide lens. The brightest area of clouds is right at the edge of the building, which frames it up nicely. Hardly a masterpiece, but I’d say it’s more interesting than the first photo.

Some changes are more subtle. The IR filter does something funny to this “no parking” sign:

This disappearing text thing happens pretty frequently in my experience, but only ever with red text. There must be a common red pigment that reflects NIR light, causing it to look white in my IR photos. Or, perhaps that red dye is actually transparent to NIR light, and the IR photos are just showing the color of the material behind the red text. Maybe it’s one of those things, compounded by the IR filter letting through a teeny bit of visible red light. Hmm.

There are other changes, too. Take a peek under the staircase, off to the left:

The non-IR photo is on the left, and the IR photo is on the right. Besides making text disappear, IR photography also causes Subarus to disappear. I’ll be here all night.

Man-made materials like concrete don’t reflect NIR light all that much. As a result, the sidewalk, the underside of the staircase, and the lamp post get darker in the IR photo. Meanwhile, green plants reflect NIR light very strongly, hence the foliage appearing much brighter in the IR photo.

The brightness of green plants contrasted with dark skies can give IR photos a very eerie look, especially when shot on a sunny day with clear skies. This is called the “Wood Effect.” Here’s a better example of the Wood Effect in action:

This photo was shot on Rollei Infrared, with the same infrared filter from earlier. The reflective chlorophyll turns the trees and grass a ghostly white, while the sky remains pretty dark. Water absorbs NIR light, so the lake remains dark too. If you’re familiar with Milwaukee’s skyline, you’ll also notice that the funny effect with red text happened again.

Sensitivity and Inconvenience

Take another peek at the last photo, and you might also notice that the leaves and grass look a bit fuzzy, while the rest of the photo is sharp. This has nothing to do with IR, and everything to do with the film itself.

Both Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared are much less sensitive to IR than visible light. So, when you use an IR filter with them, you have to take much longer exposures. Also, I fibbed when I said the lens filter is “transparent” to 720 nm light. It’s probably not perfectly transparent at any wavelength.

Rollei claims that its infrared film is ISO 400 (in my experience it’s more like ISO 250). But, when I use my IR filter with Rollei Infrared, I use an external light meter set to ISO 16-25, depending on weather conditions. Foto 100 is an ISO 100 film, but shoots around ISO 8-12 with the IR filter, depending on cloud cover.

If you aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of photography and all of this was gibberish to you: I’m impressed you’ve made it this far. Also, the above photo-babble means that Rollei Infrared is roughly 13 times less sensitive to NIR light than it is to visible light. Likewise, Foto 100 is roughly 10 times less sensitive to NIR light. Non-laymen are screaming right now about filter factor, but make no mistake: these films are barely sensitive to infrared light. They’re still very special, because normal film isn’t sensitive to infrared light at all.

The above gibberish also means that you’re going to have to put your camera on a tripod. Otherwise, your whole photo will be a motion-blurred mess. Even with a tripod, a tiny breeze will cause the foliage to shift as you take your photo, resulting in a bit of motion blur. That’s why so many of the IR photos in this post have a bit of blur, especially where there are plants.

Out of Focus

You can counter the motion blur in IR photos using a wider aperture, just as you would in a normal photo. As usual, that will also force you to focus the camera more precisely. This is a problem, because focusing for IR photography is inherently imprecise.

Different wavelengths of light focus at different distances behind the lens. That’s why cheap cameras and poor-quality lenses tend to have some colorful fringing around hard edges. The technical term is “chromatic aberration.” Virtually all “modern” (1960s and newer) lenses are designed to counteract chromatic aberration using multiple cleverly-arranged lens elements. Some lenses are much better at this than others, but most of them are pretty good at it – as long as you’re taking photos using visible light.

Put that infrared filter on your camera, and now you’re taking photos using a narrow band of light that’s just outside the visible spectrum. Because it’s a narrow band, all the light focuses at roughly the same distance behind the lens. Chromatic aberration is impossible here, because there aren’t disparate wavelengths focusing at different distances.

But, because that light isn’t in the visible spectrum, your lens wasn’t designed to focus that light in the correct spot. As a result, if you focus your camera normally, then take an IR photo, the resulting image won’t be in focus.

To counter this, a lot of old lenses include a special tick mark for focusing NIR photos. The mark is usually red, and is sometimes marked with the letter “R.” See if you can find it:

When you focus for infrared, you first set the camera’s focus as you would normally. Then, you de-focus it a very specific amount specified by the red tick mark on the lens. To our wimpy human eyes, the image in the viewfinder will appear out-of-focus. To the infrared film, it’ll look just right.

It’s very rare to see an IR mark on new lenses, and it wasn’t even a given on vintage lenses. IR marks were never universal, but their complete disappearance seems to have coincided with the rise of autofocus in the 1980s.

I’ve tried guessing focus on lenses without the tick mark. Don’t bother.

In short, IR photography has several quirks with fiddly workarounds. For my part, I like the aesthetic qualities that IR’s weirdness can lend to a photograph, like the ghostly white foliage and motion blur. The focusing thing is just plain annoying, though.

Results

I had a blast shooting Foto 100. Taking it down to the beach was definitely the right move.

A yellow filter normally cuts through the haze of a humid summer day, but this day was downright muggy. The yellow filter helped, but there’s still a hint of that humid haze:

Foto 100 is a lot like Rollei Infrared, but with much finer grain. As a result, details don’t get lost in the grainy noise. I love the way Foto 100 rendered the wood grain of the pallets here:

With Rollei Infrared, I feel compelled to only take IR photos. With Foto 100, I found myself using a variety of color filters to get the right effect for the scene I was shooting, mixing in IR only when the scene called for it.

Everything was going swimmingly, until…

… wait, what was that?

In short, the weirdness with these infrared stocks doesn’t stop after you shoot your last frame. They’re weird in the darkroom, too. Let’s make a short story long:

In the Lab

Black-and-white film development is easy. Here’s the entire process, from start to finish:

1. Soak the film in a dilute development chemical at 20° C (68° F). Agitate every minute or so.
2. Soak the film in stop bath for 15-ish seconds.
3. Soak the film in dilute fixer for a few minutes, agitating every minute or so.
4. Rinse the film in distilled water with a teeny bit of wetting agent (a.k.a. Photo-Flo, a.k.a. surfactant, a.k.a. fancy soap) to make sure the film dries without water spots.
5. Hang the film up to dry.

It’s really that easy. You can make it even easier, too – steps 2 and 4 are both optional. Step 1 is the only step that needs precise temperature control, and the correct temperature is room temperature. You can even get away with using tap water.

The only tricky thing is that every film needs a different amount of time in the developer. Development time also depends on what kind of development chemical you’re using. Finding the correct development time is easy, though. Just hop over to Massive Dev Chart, plug in your film and chemicals, and it’ll tell you how much you need to dilute your developer and how long the film needs to sit in the developer. To be thorough, you should also check the datasheet for your film stock and/or chemicals for a manufacturer-recommended time.

Here’s the problem: Massive Dev Chart didn’t have data for my particular combination of film and chemical (Foto 100 and Ilford DD-X). Also, when you start shooting dank Ukrainian film, you don’t have a datasheet to reference anymore. I couldn’t find a single person online talking about developing Foto 100 in DD-X, so I couldn’t reference someone else’s numbers either. All I could do is guess, and guess I did:

Hand-Waving

Okay, so DD-X is a Hydroquinone-based developer. Maybe it behaves similarly to other Hydroquinone developers, like D-76? We’ve also established that Rollei Infrared is really similar to Foto 100, so maybe Foto 100 develops similarly to Rollei Infrared? Hmm.

With these guesses in mind, let’s make a table of developers and chemicals. Here’s the data from Massive Dev Chart (shown in minutes and seconds):

	Rollei IR	Foto 100
D-76, stock dilution	6:00	7:00
D-76, 1:1 dilution	9:30	11:30
DD-X, 1:4 dilution	10:00	??????

I’m not a chemist, but if I had to guess, development times probably work on some kind of logarithmic scale. Like, development happens slower as more time passes, since the developer becomes more depleted. Or something like that.

In that case, let’s take the natural log of each development time:

	Rollei IR	Foto 100
D-76, stock dilution	ln(6) = 1.79	ln(7) = 1.95
D-76, 1:1 dilution	ln(9.5) = 2.25	ln(11.5) = 2.44
DD-X, 1:4 dilution	ln(10) = 2.30	ln(???) = ????

Okay, so if you have Rollei Infrared’s development time, it seems like you can add a little bit to the natural log, between 0.16 and 0.19, and that will give you Foto 100’s development time. Let’s split the difference by adding 0.175 to the natural log of the Rollei IR/DD-X combo. That gives us 2.475. e^2.475 is 11.88. Let’s round that to 12.

Cool, so 12 minutes is our development time! Maybe. I think.

Did it Work?

Of course it worked! You already saw a few of the photos. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe I really stumbled on a good way of guessing development times, but 12 minutes was almost perfect. I dialed it back to 11:30 for the second roll, and the results were marginally better.

So, I nailed the development time, and I got good photos on both rolls of Foto 100 I shot. As you can see, these trees have the characteristic ghostly IR look. It’s a great exposure, the only problem is the horrid alien blob covering most of the picture:

A Note On Pre-Washing

On the first roll of Foto 100, I forgot an extra development step that I had adopted for Rollei Infrared. The result is yellow crap and undeveloped splotches on the film:

I believe there are a couple things at play here. The first issue is that the thin substrate likes to flex inside the development tank. As a result, the coiled-up film can touch itself, creating pockets where developer struggles to reach. However, that doesn’t explain the yellow blotches, or the large undeveloped areas.

Look closely at the tail sticking out of these film cartridges:

The Rollei and Svema film both appear black, but the Ilford film on the right is a purple-tinted gray. Every black-and-white film I’ve shot has been grayish-purple like the Ilford film, except for Rollei Infrared and Foto 100. I suspect that the black coloration comes from some kind of chemical protective layer, an extra thing put over the top of the silver emulsion.

When I develop Foto 100 or Rollei Infrared using the standard 4-step process (develop, stop, fix, wash), the film turns my nice, clear developer a dark yellow or orange. This doesn’t happen with any other film I’ve used, and it’s definitely a bad sign. So, I started using a pre-wash.

To pre-wash film, you just soak it in room-temperature distilled water for a minute or so, and agitate gently. With every other black-and-white film, the pre-wash is perfectly clear when you pour it out. With Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared, however, the pre-wash comes out black.

It seems like the pre-wash eliminates nearly all the contaminant that’s messing with development. When I remember to pre-wash these films, I don’t get any of the yellow blotches and the undeveloped areas are either very tiny or completely eliminated. Also, the developer comes out pale yellow instead of dark yellow or orange. I’m not certain of what’s going on here, but the pre-wash is definitely helping.

Also note that these are the only black-and-white film stocks where I’ve observed any changes as a result of pre-washing. Every other black-and-white film I’ve shot, from both Kodak and Ilford, seems totally unaffected by pre-washing. Since it usually has no effect, I normally don’t bother with it. But, as I’ve established so thoroughly, Foto 100 and Rollei Infrared are anything but normal.

Foto 100’s Origins

At the beginning of this post, I said Foto 100 was “allegedly manufactured in Shostka, Ukraine.” After a few hours of research, I’ve determined this is only half-true.

Svema Foto 100 is indeed packaged in eastern Ukraine, but the film itself most certainly is not manufactured by Svema. I’m certain of this, because the Svema factory in Shostka was demolished in 2019. It’s virtually impossible to find any English-language sources, but I think the photo from this Ukrainian-language source transcends linguistic barriers:

The English-language Wikipedia page for Svema says that the company went out of business in the mid-2010s. When Wikipedia says “Svema” went out of business, I suspect that they actually mean Astrum, Svema’s parent company, went out of business and took the Svema brand down with them. Astrum’s website hasn’t been updated in over 10 years.

Yet, that also can’t be the whole story. You just saw multiple new rolls of Svema film. The film came packaged in a bulk reel with a Svema logo on it. The package was shipped from eastern Ukraine. There’s an active Instagram account called @svema_official, proudly claiming origins in Shostka and a history going back to 1931. Naturally, that account doesn’t provide links to any other websites or contact info. I’d tell you Svema is uniquely obscure, but the whole point of obscurity is that you don’t know about them. Maybe there are hundreds of film brands whose entire public presence consists of a single Instagram account. Who knows?

Whatever Svema is today, I highly doubt it’s the same Svema that was once a Soviet state-owned company. Foto 100 shares so many of Rollei Infrared’s peculiarities that I’m certain they’re made in the same factory. There just aren’t a lot of places that make film anymore. Rollei Infrared is manufactured by Agfa-Gevaert, which means my dank former-Soviet film might actually be manufactured by the distant remnant of a West German industrial cartel. Funny how these things play out.

Closing Thoughts

In 2025, the overwhelming majority of photographic film is manufactured by Kodak or Ilford. Make no mistake, there are dozens of other brands that sell film. But, most of these companies just put a logo on film manufactured by someone else. Even Fujifilm just puts a logo on Kodak stocks nowadays. The manufacturing process has a profound influence on the characteristics of the resulting photos. Thus, as the number of film manufacturers declines, the amount of creative variety available to artists declines as well.

Foto 100 doesn’t run totally against the trend; it clearly isn’t made in an obscure Ukrainian factory. There are a handful of other small European brands also selling 100-speed infrared film, and I’m sure they’re all putting different logos on exactly the same film. But, that doesn’t make this film bad. To the contrary, Foto 100 is fantastic. Foto 100’s grain is much finer than Rollei Infrared’s, and its exposure latitude is more forgiving. Foto 100 has opened up new creative avenues for my photography. I’d encourage anyone to go out and shoot this film, even if the packaging doesn’t carry the Svema brand.