Kodak Ektachrome 100 – My First Time Shooting Slide Film
One of London’s many parakeets, the slide film is detailed enough to capture the finer points of the bird’s feathers. 1/80s 200mm F4.0.
Loved by professionals and amateurs alike for its great colours and high levels of detail, slide film is the best you can buy when it comes to film photography. You or your parents probably have boxes of slides in the attic from the pre-digital days, documenting holidays and life events from yesteryear. Sadly, as with other types of film, there is much less available now than in its heyday. There used to be many different types of film with different ISOs and different white balances so you could always find something to suit the situation. The most famous of all was Kodak’s Kodachrome but sadly not only can you no longer buy it, but you couldn’t even develop it even if you had an expired roll of film like I do. For those who are wondering what the difference between slide film and negative film is, the former was rather unsurprisingly produced for projection whereas the latter was produced for printing. Slide film produces a positive image that you can see right away without having to have it converted.
Photographing the cherry blossom was a good way to test out capturing detail as well as how bokeh was rendered. I was pleased on both counts. Though perhaps next time I would go the whole hog and shoot at the widest possible aperture. 1/500s 105mm F5.6.
I also took this shot on my 20mm F1.8 lens, it still gives an impressive amount of bokeh for such a wide lens but I think I really did need to shoot at 1.8 as it didn’t render the bokeh as well as the macro lens did when stopped down. 1/500s 20mm F5.6.
There are four types left: Kodak Ektachrome 100, Fuji Provia 100, Fuji Velvia 50 & Fuji Velvia 100. Kodak had actually stopped making Ektachrome for a period of time, but thankfully they brought it back and it is often the cheapest roll of slide film you can buy. This made it perfect for me as I looked to shoot this format for the very first time. However, don’t think it is actually cheap, I think I paid about £16 for the roll (and then around £6 to develop it), but the prices have increased further as supplies have been disrupted by the repercussions of Covid & Brexit.
An attractive row of houses in a posh part of London. 1/60s 50mm F8.0.
Speaking of posh - I was rather surprised to see a Rolls-Royce Phantom ice cream van situated in Kensington Gardens. For some reason I never did take a front shot on either this camera or my Bronica SQA. A good excuse to go back and see it again I suppose. 1/100s 50mm F8.0.
I had read and watched a lot of content about shooting slide (or transparency as some people call it), and I was a little fearful of the major drawback, which is the limited dynamic range. With colour negatives you are looking at around fourteen stops of dynamic range, whereas with slide you only have around five or less. Were my images all going to come back over- or underexposed? To make things more interesting I decided to utilise only the inbuilt light meter of my Nikon F100. I surmised as this was an expensive professional level camera in its day that it would have been designed for slide film in mind. In theory it should give me a reading that was accurate enough to use. However, I didn’t know for sure and many people I had seen online were using high end light meters to get everything perfect.
Feeding the Parakeets peanuts seems to be a major source of entertainment for visitors to the various parks in London. I will admit it is quite satisfying when one lands on your hand to take the nut. 1/80s 200mm F4.0.
It’d been so long since I’d seen the Albert Memorial I’d forgotten just how splendid it is. I was very happy with how the details and colour of the gold leaf has been rendered here. A shame you don’t see things as grand as this built these days. 1/200s 105mm F8.0.
I needn’t have worried though, as when I got all my images back, they were all correctly exposed and useable (except for a few experimental ones). I was genuinely shocked, and it goes to show there really is nothing to fear from shooting slide, the F100’s inbuilt light meet is pretty primitive compared to a modern DSLR but it still handled it without issue. The difficulty I didn’t expect though was scanning, the rolls itself seem to be a bit thinner than the negative film I had shot with before, which meant there was less boarder area around the image to be held within my film holder. Subsequently I don’t think all my scans were sharp edge to edge, so I will need to be more careful of that in the future.
The towering gate of London’s China Town. 1/200s 50mm F8.0.
As to be expected, lanterns were hung up everywhere above our heads, over the street. 1/320s 50mm F8.0.
There’s all kinds of different food shops in China town, either for those who’ve moved from abroad or for the Londoner that fancies something a bit different. 1/60s 50mm F3.5.
Some of China Town’s less fortunate residence. Still, they provide a great way of attracting attention to the shop. 1/60s 50mm F2.8.
Ektachrome is known to be more orange & less blue/purple than Fuji’s slide films and I have tried my best to preserve that in my scanned images, though there are always some issues with colour when it comes to scanning. Thankfully playing around with it in Lightroom can fix most of these issues and it is impressive how much more detail I can pull out just by changing a few other settings. The big advantage of slide is that as you can see your positive images on the light table you can see what they are actually supposed to look like before they were scanned which you obviously can’t do with negatives.
Shops had re-opened following Lockdown when I took these photos, though it was not as busy as it would normally be. The shops of Kensington High Street do look grand in their stone settings. 1/80s 50mm F8.0.
This was in reference to the date that lockdown ended and the cinema could re-open. All the more amusing to me as the 17th May is my birthday. 1/400s 50mm F8.0.
Overall, though it was expensive, I was really happy with my results, and it is quite clear that what people say about vibrant colours and great detail really is true. This is something I will shoot again, but as it was in this case, I will shoot it sparingly in order to keep costs down. If you’ve not shot slide film before then I do recommend it, there’s just something satisfying about seeing your images on the light table right away once you open the packet. I now feel confident enough to put some rolls through my Bronica SQA, so I will be really excited to see what the quality and detail will be like from using it in medium format.
Kensington High Street. 1/200s 50mm F8.0.
This rather ostentatious pink-wrapped McLaren is somewhat emblematic of the clientele of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, where this car was parked in front of. 1/50s 50mm F4.0 with polariser.
What have your experiences with slide film been? Do you still have boxes of them stored safely away somewhere? Let me know in the comments down below.
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