evening

3 Emulsions: Part 1

Kodak UltraMax400

Since Fuji Superia400X has been discontinued 😦 I’m trying out a couple different ISO400 C-41 film stocks. The political economy of film photography is… well… weird RN… and film pricing is responding to inflation, fashion, private equity capital flows and the market distortions caused by Kodaks 2012 bankruptcy that are still rattling around the global economy. I don’t really obsess about which color film I use. My target is an under $10/36exposure roll of ISO400 C-41 process film for everyday work. When I find one that works for me I buy a brick, stash it in the freezer and use it till it’s gone.

One thing I liked about Superia was it did this when you overexposed it 1 stop… You got increased saturation, contrast and a bump in shadow detail without blowing out highlights. It also shifted a bit warmer without getting weird.:

So I bought some current production film and shot some test rolls: Kodak UltraMax400, the new Fuji400, and Wolfen NC400, to see how they respond to the light. I bracketed 3 exposures of each scene: box speed , 1 stop under, and 1 stop over. Developed normally – not pushed or pulled – we get normal, under, and over exposed images.

For consistency I used the same camera and lens (Nikon F6 w/Nikkor 28-105 f/3.5-5.6), and the cameras internal matrix metering mode with no filters or fill flash. All 3 rolls were processed and scanned by Indie Photo here in Philly.

The light in many of these shots pushes at the limit of the films dynamic range that could be controlled through lots of traditional techniques, but the whole point of this experiment was to test those limits. Here’s the results for Kodak UltraMax400:

My biggest takeaway is that this film stock is consistent with other Kodak consumer films I’ve used. It’s a bit ‘hard’ and not quite as forgiving as the old Fuji SuperiaX or Kodak Portra. Over exposed we do get increased saturation but with less latitude, more contrast, and the highlights tend to blow out. Looking at the sunset we got a dramatic color shift that wasn’t correctable. It also doesn’t like being underexposed, we get a magenta shift in the shadows. Nothing that can’t be handled with more careful and intentional exposures (or some tweaking in Lightroom). It has its strengths – and its weaknesses are all manageable, but I won’t be shooting this emulsion at ISO200 on a routine basis.

A Bakers Dozen…

Best Laid Plans….

I started out giving myself a project of picking my 12 favorite shots from 2017 because…. well its that time of year… Anyway, that quickly got out of hand, so I gave up on that and changed the self assignment to pick 12 shots from 2017 that I like but hadn’t posted. That morphed into putting together a cross section of shots from 2017 that represented some experiments, diverse content, cameras and medium (35mm and Medium Format film, and digital). 12 grew to 13… Cuz I wanted the Meek Mill pic in there… So here it is.

Cameras Used: Nikon D300 (Digital), Nikon F100, Nikon FE2, Zorki 4, Yashica D

Films Used: TriX, Kodak Portra 400, HP5, Fomopan100

Come To The Promised Land

Took some time this summer to go camping at Promised Land State Park in north east Pa. This part of the world has seen more than one boom come and go. The timber was clear cut in the 19th century ( the forests we see today are second and third growth), the coal and steel are gone and with them the railways. Once industry had extracted all the profits from the ground, the land was turned over to the state and the ‘taxpayers’ (that’s us) for ‘rehabilitation’.

For a hot moment there was money to made here as a mountain resort town but those glory days are long gone. Now we are left with the lake and hiking trails, the WPA built dams and campground, struggling working class communities getting squeezed by  New York City developers…. and a lot of empty space.

 

Color pics Nikon D300. Black and white images Nikon FE2 on Kodak TriX and Ilford HP5 film – developed and scanned by hand. Minimal processing in Adobe LightRoom.

Lenses used: Nikon 24mm f/2.8 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AIS, 105mm f/2.5