On a shoot last week I found I had not brought enough Ilford Delta 400 film with me. This film is my bread and butter for black and white portraits, and so with some trepidation I was forced to dip into my camera bag for some Ultrafine Extreme 400, an inexpensive film I had not shot before. When it was time to process the film I did some research online and was not happy to see various lousy reviews of the film, until I ran into a post by a photographer I know on Flickr who had managed to tame this beast. I messaged him a couple of questions and in a very short time I had the magic formula (Xtol, 1:1 for 13 minutes @68 degrees). The negatives turned out fine (an example is below).
This will never be my primary film (I got it mainly as a cheaper way to test lighting set-ups), but I still got some great shots, thanks to a helping hand from the Internet