I am kind of ambivalent about film and just use anything available, of course with an eye toward affordability. After starting to do my own C-41 developing, I bought a couple boxes of 120 Lomography films and Kodak Gold 200 last fall. The imaging qualities are fine in my opinion but the curl of the negatives has been driving me crazy. After a conversation about film bases at a Photo Opp photowalk, I picked up a few rolls of Kodak's higher end films to see if they were more managable in the scanner, including a roll of Ektar 100.
Inventorying my supply of film a week or so ago, I discovered that roll and loaded it into The Little Mutant. I remember someone once describing the fine grain and color rendition of Ektar 100 in mythical terms. The tufted pillow and love seat seemed a nicely lit test of the film's subtlety.
The sun through the trees with it's reflection in Lake Winnebago is kind of an extreme test of latitude. Just barely any detail on the shadow side and some odd color shifting in those shadows. In one my early blog posts with Ektar 100, I noted that it doesn't like being underexposed.
Not quite as high contrast, a jumble of cuboids and rectangles behind Jensens Bar. The shadows look the right color.
What first got my attention was the gaudy green with the green license plate on this Honda Insight with "Hybrid" badging on the rear, and then noticed it was a collector plate. I probably knew about it at the time, but it seems weird that hybrids have been available for 20 years.
Across the river, I rode into Pioneer Marina's parking lot to check out all the sailboats and encountered this flaming hot rod. While I was getting the tripod set up, the owner of the Crown Vic next to it came out and offered to move his car out of my picture. He told me the roadster belonged to the marina's owner. Not too much of the original Model T left. The V8 is a Chevy. No mention of the cardboard camera.
This former paint store seemed an appropriate color film subject. Not sure if it was accidentally done with the rising pinhole instead of the one on the axis, but I like the whispy sky and the crazy jagged line across the middle of the compostion.
The camera sat idle for a while and then went with me to the Fox Valley Photography Group meeting at the Kaukana Public Library. All the lines, planes and angles caught my eye with variations of the stones and yellow reflective strips on the stairs to test the Ektar.
Trying to think of where to take pictures that I hadn't been recently, the Paine Art Center's garden was one option. Considering the sunny day, I recalled that I've always wanted to get the morning sunbeams streaming into the north/eastern facing dining and breakfast rooms before the rest of the building got in the way. A quick check of The Photographer's Ephemeris showed they might still be there if I arrived right when they opened at 10:00. After some discussion at the front desk, and mentioning I only had a few minutes before the scene changed, the staff at the door trusted me that I had been given permission to use a tripod before the pandemic. I had forgotten that this was the slow Ektar in the camera and exposures were longer than I had anticipated. Forgetting to change the camera settings in Pinhole Assist led to one very underexposed negative of the dining room, but the sunbeams were still there after correcting and exposing another frame. Later one of the staff asked me if I got anything good. I replied that sunbeams in that dark room were a pretty good exposure challenge, but sometimes film will surprise you.
Just enough sunlight left in the breakfast room to make a highlight on the sculpture's shoulder and light up the glass compote.
Left with one frame when leaving the building, this column in the driveway seemed particularly 3D.
There really doesn't seem to be anything overwhelmingly different from the cheaper films in terms of color rendition. As usual these were edited with burning and dodging and color balance. Most of the time highlight and shadow detail could be preserved. As I had done with the Lomo and Gold 200 I was so frustrated with, I cut the negatives as soon as they weren't sticky and placed them under heavy books overnight. They, like the Portra films I'd used earlier, dried perfectly flat.
The Little Mutant has two hand-drilled .27mm pinholes, on the axis and 13mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Ektar was developed in an Arista.edu Liquid Quart C41 kit.
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