6 Images… From Kodak Ektar 100 in Paris on a Canon A-1 (35mm Format / EI 100 / Multiple Lenses) – by Nick Orloff
I’ve never really been a fan of Ektar.
It’s not that I don’t like it, but in my personal hierarchy of color negative film there always seems to be something I like best… My first choice is usually Portrait 800usually shot at 200 or 400 – love how colors saturate when overexposed – then Kodak Gold (good value in 35mm, not so good in 120) then probably Lomography 800 (also overexposed a stop or two ), then maybe Cinestill 800 (because NEON) and then Ektar 100.
Wait a second, I have to go back and explain how I ended up in Paris with a few rolls of Ektar 100 in our Airbnb fridge and a (new to me) Cannon A-1 to shoot with.
My wife and I are on an extended vacation. Maybe it’s a sabbatical, maybe it’s our escape from Australia after the borders were closed for two years. Whatever the reason, we left home a while ago to spend 6 months hanging out in interesting places.
Like everyone else Photographer with GAS, choosing just one camera for a trip – especially a trip that’s going to last 6 months – took more time than thinking about packing clothes or finding accommodations. It was never going to be just one. I ended up with my Konica Hexar RF, 35mm and 50mm Summicrons, a Fujifilm X-Pro3 and a single lens, the lovely 23mm f/2, and a borrowed Mamiya 7 and 60mm lens.
Although I have a fridge full of films, I’ve decided not to take any with me – I’m paranoid about modern airport scanners and foggy films, and to be honest, I try to manually convince the surly and impatient airport security guards inspect my movie when “the scanner won’t hurt him”.
Our first stop was in London, I’m a big fan of Analogue Wonderland so decided to get busy filming when I landed. But there were two rolls of Ektar (unwrapped for some reason) in the fridge, so I threw them away at the last minute.
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Everything was fine until I realized the Konica Hexar RF had a problem: the frame lines aren’t square, so all my images were slightly tilted. Fairly easy to fix in Lightroom but still frustrating. While away for a few days to get a repair quote (far too many £ to fix, I can live with the problem), fearing the worst I started to panic scrolling through eBay for a ‘replacement’ appropriate.
I’ve always liked the way Canon FD lenses render images for film and digital, so I started looking for a suitable body (and an FD to FujiX adapter) to use on the 50mm f/1.4 that I ‘ve found for a very reasonable price. After some research, including a great article on Casual Photophile, I opted for an A-1 and found a cheap one as the mirror return doesn’t work until the camera is rolled up in the following image (but the seller included a motor, which despite its weight and cost of AA batteries, is a reasonable workaround). And a 28mm f/2.8.
So, a very long explanation brings us later to Paris, a Canon A-1 and Ektar film, shot at box speed.
I wasn’t expecting much, but as I clicked from scan to scan, my smile kept growing. I don’t know if the FD glass, Parisian light and Ektar combined to form an almost magical photographic Venn diagram, but in full sun, shade, golden hour, the colors in each frame were just right , just saturated enough that I was seeing what I had seen through the lens.
But don’t try to do portraits with it. That’s what Portra is for.
~ Nick
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