Fun with Kodak Ektar 100

I am currently experimenting with Kodak Ektar 100 C-41 film. With Kodachrome 64 discontinued and E-6 slide processing getting difficult to find, having this new film from Big Yellow Father is a gift, most of the time. This film stumps me with blue skies.

Ektar 100 is well as its name states, is available in 100 ISO only in 135 and 120mm format, it’s relatively cheap ($4.95 a roll at Film Plus) and is the finest grained colour negative (C-41) film on the market. I picked up six rolls to conduct tests to see what I can get running the film through my gear. The first roll went through my Leica M3 with the shots being incident metered with Gossen Profsix Light meter. Great outcome from that session which can be found with my Webster’s Falls outing in late April.

The most recent roll was exposed in my Olympus OM-2n a compact 35mm SLR with aperture priority ability and “off the film” metering, I have never taken a bad shot with this camera. All my lenses have UV filters on them and I only use a Polariser sparingly. The roll was processed at a mini lab at a local Shoppers Drug Mart and they do great work with Fujifilm. I think part of the problem stems from the drug store scanning process, and the other part is not exposing the image properly on the film, the skies have a cyan cast to them.

Old Barn Silo

Now Contrast with the images on the bottom which were scanned in with my Epson V500 with 48 bit colour settings (see below). I found I got more realistic look to the images, the skies look right this time ot. Now having that figured out, from now on I am doing the scanning.

Old Silo Neg Scan

Silo Neg scan

Outside of direct sun, Ektar 100 blows my mind (see images below).

Lots of Daisies

Used to be Dominion Rd

Comments

Shoppers is not known for high quality scanning at all. You're right to be sparing with the polarizer, but only when it comes to wide angle lenses. if you used a polarizer with the silo shot, that would explain the gradient. In short: wide angle lenses don't normally play well with wide angle lenses, the result being a gradient effect.

Otherwise, thanks for the tip off about this film. I'm fortunate to still have a lab or two in Ottawa that still does E-6, but it's good to know that there are some reasonable c-41 options. Once I'm done with my 75 rolls of fuji and Agfa, I'll try it out... in 2013.
Bill Smith said…
Ektar 100 requires you to be mindful of exposures in certain light environments, outside of that, it's a brilliant film.

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