Kodak Ektachrome E100G Colour Slide Film ISO 100 35 mm 36 Exposures Transparent

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Ektachrome’s specificity makes it hard to place among other color films. It’s not a do-it-all film like Kodak Portra 400 or Fuji Pro 400H. It’s not even the cream of the crop professional tool like Fuji Provia 100F. If I had to place it anywhere, I’d place it close to Kodak Ektar in that it’s a bit of a character piece, even though it features a better overall color rendition than that film. But if I really think about it, Ektachrome stands alone. Bunting, Roger K. (1987). The Chemistry of Photography (2nded.). Normal, IL: Photoglass Press. p.126. ISBN 0-9616724-0-4. In the 1960’s and ’70’s I used K25 and K64, together with Ektachrome 64 and 100. In my ignorance, I’d always try and buy films with the longest use-by date, but this was governed by what was on the shelves of dealers. What I noticed with Kodachrome in particular was a distinct difference between the really fresh films compared to those with much later use by dates. I’m not going to say it gives you better images because that’s a subjective thing. But if the things this film does well are things you like to see in a photograph, you’re probably going to be very impressed with it indeed. We knew that Kodak Ektachrome 100, and E6 film generally, are known for extremely fine grain, and clean colours. And it is the colours that are the first thing you notice when you see the photos. We are really impressed at how the film has handled colour tones. Bright colours like the reds really pop, and natural tones such as the blues and greens remain true to life. If colour accuracy is important to you, then you have to try this film.

In my 4th post I showed a video I’d made of my travelling to meet Duncan from Silverpan Film Lab. In the video, I talk to Duncan a fair bit about what I’d already learned about the film in terms of how to accurately expose it for the results I wanted. I also shared a whole series of images that I took as I walked around Bristol. The most notable outcome of those shots was how blue-shifted they were. This initially confused me slightly as I was 100% happy that I’d exposed a lot of them correctly and as they’d been shot in daylight, I wasn’t sure how it could be a colour balance issue. That was until Terry commented on the post. The people behind those have done what they can with the resources available to them. Producing film is a massive operation and it’s nigh on impossible for an individual or small business to make a genuine brand new one from scratch. It needs someone like Kodak to do it. Or Ilford with their Ortho Plus. Or Fuji with their Acros II (kinda made by Ilford). While the faster ISO speed/1-stop advantage makes this a marginally more versatile film than its slower counterpart, you really have to be dead-on with the exposure as Velvia 100 has an extremely low dynamic range. Fujichrome Velvia 50 film has been a favorite of landscape photographers since it was first introduced in the 1990’s, and was one of the death knells for Kodak’s long standing and more difficult to process Kodachrome. Slide film is difficult to produce; it has more layers than colour negative film and requires specific processes and components. This unfortunate reality eventually led to the complete disappearance of all Ektachrome (and its Elitechrome rebrand products) from the shelves in 2013. The wide variety of film speeds, up to ISO 400, including the tungsten-balanced versions, were all suddenly gone.These slideshows were made possible with slide film and by projecting light through the transparencies or slides onto a blank screen. A Note about Slide Film Perhaps that’s why Ektachrome was often used for other things throughout its long history. Things like portraits and fashion shoots or landscape and nature work, where you could control the light or just wait for it to be optimal.

Ektachrome E100 is one of the sharpest modern colour emulsions. The film resolves at an RMS granularity of 8 , the same as Fujichrome Provia 100F but significantly finer than Fujichrome Provia 400F ’s RMS 13. The fine grain of the E6 slide film is far superior to the detail captures than most colour negative films. Kodak Ektar 100 grain is finer than Kodak Portra and Fuji Pro 400H. Cinestill 50D (Kodak Vision3 50D) is also very fine grain but with it’s own colours. Personally I find 35mm Kodka Portra 400 often too grainy for my taste and I sometimes opt for the cheap Fujicolor C200 film that has less apparent grain. Film expsoure latitude It’s difficult to hold any of the following against Ektachrome itself, as these pertain to color reversal films more broadly. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention them: Figure 2: Underexposed Ektachrome E100 scans may benefit from histogram equalization to remove non-information from your image and restore the film’s natural clarity and colour rendition.

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Shooting Ektachrome felt somehow more special than shooting other films too, although maybe that was just something going on in my head. And this is going to sound trite too but when the results are good, you can just tell they were shot on a good film. That all sounds like things you can get with various colour negative films too, though. For me, with my limited experience of shooting it, what sets slide film apart is what I think comes from the sum of all the parts mentioned above. Process history [ edit ] E-1 Initial Ektachrome process for sheet and roll film (1946 – c. 1950s) [11] [12] E-2 Updated Ektachrome process for roll film and 135 film (1955–1966). [13] [14] [15] A 1959 modification was called "improved" E-2. [16] E-3 Updated "professional" Ektachrome process for sheet film and Kodak EP professional rollfilm (1959 to 1976) E-4 Updated Ektachrome process for roll film and 135 film (1966–1996, see note) [17] E-4 was better at resisting fading than the earlier processes, with a life around 30 years. [18] E-5 Research project, only saw minor use in a revised form as the aerial film process AR-5 E-6 Current Ektachrome process used for all major color reversal films and formats, first released in 1977. The conditioner, bleach and stabilizer baths were modified in the mid-1990s to remove the formaldehyde from the stabilizer: This change was indicated by changing the names of the conditioner step to pre-bleach step, and the stabilizer step to the final rinse step; E-6P: Used for push processing of Kodak Ektachrome films in general, and particularly for Kodak Ektachrome EPH ISO 1600 film, [19] which has a speed of ISO 400 in normal E6, but is exposed at EI 1600 and push processed two stops in the first developer bath (10:00 @100.0°F) to achieve the ISO 1600 speed rating. (It is natural for a faster film to require a longer first development time. This is sacrificed in the case of most color processing for consistency in processing, especially in machine processing.) Most B&W films have a generous ~5-stop exposure latitude, and most color films have a ~3 stop exposure latitude, which means that you can miss the mark and still come away with a great image. But as the massively-diminished ranks of film photographers began to replenish , Kodak had a change of heart. Less than five years after complete discontinuation, the company announced the return of Ektachrome.

This step once used an acetic acid stop bath, but was replaced with a water-only bath for process economy, with concomitant slight reduction of first developer strength. [6] Advice I see for shooting slide film is to do so at box speed in good light and meter for the mid-tones. If you need more guidance, read up or ask people more experienced than me on how to get the best out of it. The image below is one that I pulled from the darkness, so to speak. Fortunately, the light was very flat, the tones were very even, and everything came out very clean. That being said, I think my results could be challenged with an underexposed image with more dynamic light, but I was still impressed with the information the film stored in the shadows.To see what each film could do I tried to shoot Kodak Ektachrome E100 and Fuji Provia 100F in a variety of lighting conditions. E6 slide film is known to have limited latitude compared to colour negative films. As such it is more common to shoot slide film in subdued light where there is less contrast. Personally I love hard light such as direct sunlight so I put the films to the test. Spoiler alert