Shooting Kodak Ektachrome 100 (120)
Perhaps the most exciting part of film photography is that feeling you get when your negatives arrive back from the lab or when you open your development tank to see what came out. But for me, nothing is quite like seeing my film positives for the first time. It’s difficult to fully comprehend a negative image where all the colours are reversed, it’s not yet finished until it is scanned on the computer, but with slide film you can see exactly what shot out of the box. I find the impression it makes really does scale with the size of the film and I had been eager to finally shoot slide with my Bronica SQ-A on 120 roll film.
From my testing of the different available slide films in 35mm, I had come to the conclusion that Kodak Ektachrome 100 was what I wanted to first shoot on medium format, and I managed to pick up a box last year before the inevitable January price hikes. With it being as expensive as it is I wanted to pick the right time to shoot so as not to waste it and the perfect opportunities came up with trips to Alexandra Palace the Southwest coast of England. I’ll share some of the images in this blog but the rest you’ll have to wait and see in the next two that will follow this one.
So, what was it like shooting this on my Bronica SQ-A? Slide film requires more precise metering with only five or six stops of dynamic range and unlike my Nikon F100, where I could control shutter speed and aperture by ⅓ stop intervals, I am limited to full stops with shutter speed and ½ stops with aperture. I would also be without an inbuilt camera meter and relying on the LightMeter app on my phone to measure my exposure. However, I wasn’t overly concerned. If you believed everything you read on the internet, you’d think slide film had only one stop of dynamic range. There’s more leeway than people think, and it all comes down to picking the right scene with a clear idea of how to shoot it. Though of course sometimes a little bit of experimentation is required. The only image I felt the small dynamic range really hindered me was the shot I took of a petrol station, but the images I took of the high-rise buildings in London show that you can shoot urban scenes at night with great results.
As ever when you only have twelve shots on a roll you have to take a more considered approach to your photography and at only ISO 100 shooting on a tripod is a must with the slower lenses and shallower depths of field that come with medium format compared to 35mm. Scanning and processing on my computer also took more effort as I find that when I use my Nikon D850 to create digital versions of the images the highlights are often blown out and the colours are not quite right (some of the sunset photos initially came out far more purple than reality). With the larger 6x6 positives however, it is much easier to see the colour and detail to adjust and colour correct to something that is almost identical to what came back from the lab.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable and thrilling experience to shoot such large and more detailed strips of slide film. I definitely learned a lot, and whilst I won’t be shooting it that often due to cost, I have some more ideas of what I’d like to shoot in the future. I have actually bought several boxes of Fuji slide film (2 x Provia, 1 x Velvia 100 and 1 x Velvia 50) which are currently sitting in the top drawer of the freezer until I need them. With the current global shortages and recently announced incoming price increases I thought it makes sense to buy in at the right price whilst I still could. Ektachrome is very different in its colour balance to Fuji’s offerings, and I will definitely shoot it again. But when you shoot film as slowly as I do and with so much else I want to try and experiment with, it could be a while.
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