Colour Conundrum pt. 1: "Kodak 5"

Colour Photography and me, sometimes I just don't know. It isn't that I have issues with it as a creative medium. Sure, black and white is it for me 90% of the time but there are times when colour is an important element. The trouble is more of a practical thing. It's easy enough to carry and extra back loaded with colour film for just those occasions. The problem is what to do with the stuff once it's been shot. Gone are the days when it was a simple matter to find a local business that could handle the processing for you. The answer should be simple enough - I know my way around the darkroom (I can do it with my eyes closed!) and colour chemistry isn't that hard to get my hands on. The trouble is a batch of C-41 chemistry only lasts for a couple of months once mixed. On average over that time span I'll probably not even shoot a single roll of colour. If I were to shoot E-6, which I'd love to, that's even worse. 

A popular option these days is to ship film away to a lab but shipping one roll at a time adds a lot of expense and if I'm going to wait until I have several rolls I might as well just do it at home. I have all the stuff after all. And so it is this is the option that I have gone with. Sounds like a near perfect plan given the circumstances, right?

Well... maybe. I'm no stranger to the C-41 process. It's fixed, predictable if you stick to a few simple guidelines with no adjustments required in time or temperatures to match a particular film, they all get processed the same way. In many ways it's easier and faster than processing a typical black and white film. Still, for reasons I'm sure had little to do with problems or inconsistencies at the development stage, recent results have fallen a little outside what I was expecting.

To begin with I had 6 rolls of film to develop: One roll each of Kodak Portra 400 and Ektar in 120, two rolls of Agfa Optima 400 in 220 that expired some time in the late 90's, a 120 roll of Lomo 100 and a roll of Fuji Superia 800 that went though one of my Nikons though I can't remember which. Together these represented all the colour film that that completed it's journey through my various cameras roughly over the past year, though in many cases they seem to have been sitting in camera for a much longer time than that. All were developed in the same batch of a 1L Unicolor C41 kit that I ordered from the Film Photography Project. It was recently mixed though I had the kit sitting around as dry chemicals for about a year and a half which should be well within expected shelf life for the unmixed chemicals. This is a two part series and here I'll be discussing the results from the Kodak emulsions and I'll follow up next time with some thoughts on all the rest.

Given that these were the most mainstream of the emulsions and, except for the Lomo, the freshest, these films gave me the most surprising results. Both of these went through my RB67. Like the other two medium format SLR systems I own it has interchangeable film magazines allowing me to switch mid-roll from one film to another and I've used this capability in the usual way to switch from the usual black and white to colour film when it seems appropriate. For the record it has always been a consistent performer the black and white images I have made with it come out just fine.

Portra 400

The Portra 400 had been loaded into the camera no more recently than 2015. I know this only because it contains a particular image, the black and white version of which first appeared in my portfolio in that year. There were only 4 (out of a possible 10) shots on the roll but it's been so long since I shot it I can't remember what might have happened that it was never completely shot. That's just how seldom I use that camera to shoot colour. For all the time it's been sitting there it's still surprising that there were such obvious issues with it. All of the images showed some degree of odd mottling. The first image was by far the strangest with a series of discoloured lines running the width of the film. Here's the straight scan:

The remaining exposures weren't nearly so affected but this odd mottling was evident in all of the exposures. Yes it's been sitting around for a while but I've developed film much older than this, including some that I'll discuss in the next instalment that was developed at the same time in the same batch of chemistry without any such issues. It's hard to say what's causing this. It's clearly not any sort of light leak as it seems to be just a variation in colouration and is worse on the first frame that would have been sitting closest to the centre of the exposed roll. One clue might come from the last of the 4 frames in which the otherwise random mottling shows one clear pattern. A cropped in image of this should make it plain enough...

And in case it's not clear where this might have come from here's a portion of the backing paper from that same roll:

I can only guess that this is the result of some sort of chemical reaction with the ink used to print the frame markings on the backing paper though curiously, to me anyway, there are no markings on the backing paper to match the lines seen in the first frame. Maybe the readership has some better suggestion?

I liked this final frame though, so just I decided to take the scan and clean things up as best I could digitally. The "Kodak 5" was gotten rid of easily enough but you don't have to look too closely to see the mottling.  If you can ignore this though I'd say I like the shot

Ektar

The second film that had gone through the RB67 was a roll of Ektar 100. It came out of the camera several months ago. If there were thoughts that the issues with the roll of Portra might have had something to do with whatever the problem must have been that caused me to shoot less than half of it most were dispelled by comparing it with this roll. Though it hadn't been sitting on the shelf nearly as long as the Portra, it also had a random mottling pattern throughout the roll and here the first three frames were plagued with particularly prominent lines that again spanned the width of the film, and again it was the same sort of greenish discolouration. Here is the third frame from that roll.

Image anomalies aside though it seems to me this roll came out much differently than any of the others. Ektar is known for it's reasonably bold colours but these seem punchy beyond reason to me. I mean it's still a fairly standard film not unsuited for standard portraiture. For example, while I'm no geologist I'm sure the rocks in this images are practically identical to the ones in the example Portra image above it that was taken about 30km away along the Lake Erie shore. They certainly don't strike me as being this sort of Mars red when I look at them. Curious indeed.

If Kodak C-41 films were generally problematic like this then I'm sure my experiences here would be old news. On the other hand if something is wrong on my end like I got a bad batch of chemistry or maybe I've just really gotten out of touch with good colour processing practice then you'd expect these problems to carry over to the other rolls I developed in this batch as well. In my best go at creating a cliff hanger then, that's what I'll look at in the next instalment so please stay tuned.

A Season for Colour

Here it is October again and, not unlike countless other photographers (at least those who live at similar latitudes), my normally black and white photographic muse begins entertaining thoughts of colour. Simple enough it seems, it's autumn, the leaves take on riotous colours and every photographer wants to capture that. I wonder though if there might not be a little more to it than the changes that occur to leaves. Beyond colour, autumn has its own emotional pallet. It's in the air, in the scents, the crisp silence of still moments, the immediacy of the chill wind, waking us from dreamy days of summer, bringing us back to earth, to the world of our direct experience, carrying its reminder that we are after all as much a part of it as anything else. There are times, even when the flaming yellows, oranges and reds of October have given way to November's dull browns, that something of this sense of presence can be lost to the abstraction of black and white.

An image from the fall of 2014 made with the Mamiya RB67 on Kodak Portra 160.

None of this is to say I'll be putting away the Ilfords, the T-Max's and the Neopans until the snow flies. Some of my most treasured black and white images were made at this time of year. Knowing there will be times when colour is an important part of the feel of an image however it does mean I making plans so I'm not caught unprepared. Two years ago I accomplished this by packing my old Nikon D80 DSLR along with the Mamiya kit. Shooting digital and film side by side like this presented me with an interesting contrast between how I thought and felt about using one photographic technology versus the other (and as a result I haven't taken a digital camera with me for creative purposes since). It did not, however, result in any memorable colour images. Last year I was better prepared with a couple of pro-packs of Kodak Portra, a 1L kit of C-41 chemistry and some thawed rolls of 35mm Fujicolor that have been sitting in the freezer for the past decade or so. To be honest black and white has become such a habit that I didn't reach for it as often as I could have and never felt I really got into the colour photography groove, but I did come away with some reasonably good images that worked where black and white wouldn't have, at least not as well.

That brings us to this year. My hopes were that by now the new Ferrania E-6 film would be on the market. Alas that project has hit more than its fair share of snags that started with the unexpected discovery of asbestos contamination in the factory which set off a small avalanche of delays in its wake. If you haven't been following the project though fear not, they are soldiering on in Italy and the project is starting to get back on track once again. Alas, not in time for there to be hope of having film on the market before it all gets covered over in a frosty white blanket.

Whether or not I'm giving the new Ferrania a go, which I inevitably will, shooting transparencies (or slides if you care to mount them) rather than colour negatives does have a certain attraction for me, especially these days. Back in my late teens and early twenties when my fascination with photography was really starting to take hold I rarely shot anything but. The great thing about this for an "improving" photographer is that since the image you would see is on the actual physical piece of film that went through your camera you saw exactly what you shot as you shot it in it's unadjusted, unadulterated, uninterpreted form. What would be more important to me these days is that having a direct positive provides me with a finished, physical, hold-it-in-your-hand image in a way that a negative doesn't. Back when the term "photo shop" referred to a place rather than an app this wasn't a big deal since when you got your colour negatives developed they came back accompanied by a small stack of prints, but as that sort of service isn't easily available, at least where I live, getting that finished physical image from colour print film has become a challenge and working with just a scan from a negative doesn't seem to be the same thing.

If that was all there was to it though I don't have to wait for Ferrania. Fujichrome is still out there and for a bit more of an adventure there's an interesting selection of transparency film available from the Film Photography Project (henceforth and heretoaft referred to as FPP). An the E-6 chemistry to process it is a little more expensive and a little trickier to use than the C-41 equivalent needed for colour negative film but still well within the threshold of how much of a challenge I'm up to. The real issue is that, once mixed, the chemistry has a shelf life that is measured in weeks. As it was the much longer lived C-41 chemistry I used last year went off as a result of sitting too long on the shelf well before it reached its potential in terms of the number of rolls I might have been able to process. To get full use from a batch of E-6 chemistry I would really need to go on a colour shooting binge. I have heard some E-6 shooters say they will save up exposed film until they have enough to justify mixing a batch of chemistry to make sure none goes to waste but that seems to me to require a special kind of patience that I just don't have.

And so it was decided that for now I was better off sticking with colour negatives. The little snag I had to confront was that at some point since last year my main supplier, B&H in New York, has unfathomably restricted their C-41 kits to in-store sales only. Now B&H is one of several great dealers for those of us who have little choice but to get our photo supplies online, but with punishingly high shipping rates from the U.S. to Canada these days the fact that B&H (at the time this is being written anyway) can offer free shipping to Canada on orders over $100 is hard to ignore. No matter though if I can't get what I need from them, I can still order C-41 kits from the FPP online store. The kits are actually priced lower than at B&H if you ignore the fact that for me that means foregoing the free shipping, and better yet sales go to support the Film Photography Podcast which, if you're not familiar, stop reading now, go to http://filmphotographyproject.com/podcast where you'll find links to listen to each episode, then return when you're ready.

The order was placed, shipped the next day and arrived a few days later. To spread the shipping cost a bit thinner I ordered two C-41 kits along with some 120 Portra 400, some 35mm Ektar and a roll of of FPP's Retrochrome E-6 which I plan to cross process in the C-41 chemistry as soon as the first batch is close to exhaustion. Retrochrome, by the way, is a typical example of the way FPP will repurpose film that was originally made for specialty applications such as motion picture duplication or traffic cameras for use by photography enthusiasts who may enjoy the unique characteristics some of these stocks offer. Retrochrome itself is from an expired surplus stock of Ektachrome 2239, a film that was produced for industrial use but with characteristics that were probably not unlike the Ektachromes available to consumers and professional photographers at the time. The unique look it offers today is likely solely due to its having mellowed over the years resulting in a warm nostalgic look as the name suggests. Who knows what if anything that will mean to me when I cross-process it in C-41 chemistry, but stay tuned and I'll let you know.

For now though I have the day free and a roll of Portra in the Bronica. I also have a mind to load a roll of the 35mm Ektar into an RB67 back with a set of home made adapters I put together for panoramas "sprocket hole" style. Autumn has hardly just begun (I can tell because the stores are only now putting out the Christmas/Hanukkah/Saturnalia merchandise) but as always will present only so many opportunities to photograph what it offers before once again I'll find myself challenged to write convincingly about the joys of photographing the ice and snow.