Switch Azure 125 - Harman’s New Creative Colour Film
Harman continues its full speed run into creating new colour films. It wasn’t that long ago that Harman released Red, the red scale film, in fact, just over a year ago. Since then, Ilford Photo, Harman’s parent company also released Kentmere 200, which is one of my favourite new black and white films. Between the two companies, they have released no less than five brand new film emulsions since December 2023 when Phoenix I came out. That is not only impressive on its own; it is unprecedented in today’s film market. No other company is producing this many new types of film. I might seem excited about it and that is because I am. One of the challenges in shooting film is that despite the plethora of choice we seem to have, most of it comes from just a handful of companies, so we need those companies to remain both financially viable and trying new things to keep the market interesting and competitive. Harman (and Ilford) are doing that for us right now and I think it’s great!
So what is Harman Switch Azure 125 (I am going to call it Azure going forward)? It is what they are calling a “creative film” which is a label put on pretty much any film that is not attempting to be a regular colour or black and white film. Azure film has had the colour channels in the film ‘switched’, so that certain colours come out a completely different colour when the film is developed. If you have used Lomography Turquoise, it seems to be a very similar type of colour palette to that. Since I have really enjoyed the times I have shot Lomo Turquoise, when I saw the first images of how Azure rendered different colours I wanted to try at least for the comparison. I wrote an article on Turquoise a few years ago that you can read here. It also meant that I would be able to compare Azure quite well to my experience with Turquoise.
When you are using a colour switch film like Azure, there are really two ways to approach it, you can take some regular photos and just see what turns out or you can get an idea on what the colour shift is and play into it. I try to do the latter, and from the example shots I have seen from Harman, it would seem that some people are taking this even more seriously than I am. The main shifts are blues shift to reddish orange, reds shift to blue and greens seem to sometimes get darker or sometimes shift if they have a stronger yellow base. I shot my roll at the box speed of 125, but I have heard depending on whether you over or under expose, you will get more or less prominent shifts.
I think that for shooting around the city, especially scenes where people are not very prominent, it really looks cool. The film doesn’t really work for people, like Turquoise, the colour shift on the skin tones I have seen is generally not very flattering. I imagine that if you had a cool idea where significant face paint or make-up was being applied, you could do something pretty special. I did hear a cool way to think about it on the Sunny 16 podcast where one of the hosts said that it works a lot like black and white once you are used to the palette. That really, black and white is a colour shift film as well in a way and you just need to adjust the way you think about your subjects.
Have a look through the photos and let me know if you have any questions about it. I shot it on my Nikon F100, which is my most modern film camera. One thing I noticed is that the film appears a little less grainy than Lomo Turquoise, on reflection though, this could have also have been the camera as I would have shot the Lomo rolls on an older camera without auto-focus.
I really enjoyed this roll of azure and will definitely get another roll soon. I have shot quite a bit of Turquoise over the years and now I have one more colour shift film to play with. Last time I checked, they still had quite a good stock in at Camera Traders if you want to pick up a roll for yourself.
