Flashback to late 2008. Digital has completely obliterated 35mm sales. Kodak, Fuji, and Ilford are about to shut down their film processing lines and go under. Digital SLR owners worldwide cheer in a unified rejoice as they drink the blood from the severed heads of film photographers in the jubilee that followed once they’ve finally won the great film vs digital wars that were fought verbally for years on many different Internet forums.
Given some of the stuff I’ve read over the past eight years on various Internet forums, the previous paragraph seems to be what most of the hardcore digital using population would have expected to happened to us Luddites by now. Instead, in late 2008, Kodak Eastman comes out and releases a new line of 35mm film: Kodak Ektar 100.
I finally got around to buying some Ektar 100 recently. From I can tell by the one roll I’ve shot so far, it is some really nice film to use. I thought I’d just go ahead and share my five favorite photos I took with my first roll of Kodak Ektar 100. Enjoy. All images taken with a Voigtlander Ultron 28mm f2.0 strapped to a Leica M6.
*Images not guaranteed to be amazing.
One roll of Kodak Ektar 100, and already I like the results more then any other color film I’ve shot in 35mm.
Additional Kodak Ektar 100 buzz.
…six years later
So. July 2015 edit. I find it interesting that six years later this post still seems to count of a fair chunk of my website’s traffic. Kind of funny since this post was originally intended as a poke to the rising tide of linkbaiting in blog titles. Hence the 5 Amazing part of the headline. Maybe I should update it to something more modern now that we are in the middle of a full blown clickbait epidemic?
Maybe use pronoun hating form? A Minnesota Man Uses This New Film. His Results? WOW! Or maybe the Your life is boring structure of These five photos taken with this new film will be the best thing you’ve seen all day.
Nah. But what I will do is ramble on about my use of Ektar since this blog post.
I didn’t use much Ektar after Kodak updated their Portra lines of film with the same sensual scanning characteristics that the Ektar had. I like to shoot hand held, so the extra film speed was important to me. However, when I started shooting 8×10 in early 2012, Ektar was way cheaper than the other film stocks. I think the prices at the time were something like $85 for a box of Ektar, vs $110 for anything else. Seeing prices already starting to creep up, I started buying up boxes of the still cheap Ektar to hedge my film stock. Then once it was announced that 8×10 Ektar was going to be discontinued in 2012, I really stocked up on it. I’ve been working through that cache of Ektar since, mainly for my non-portait photos found in my Watershed project, and am down to maybe twenty-five sheets left. Once that runs out it is back to Portra I imagine.
That said, go buy yourself some Ektar and make your camera happy.
8 Archived Comments
Whilst I can’t see the point of using a Leica M6 with anything other than a Leica lens, there certainly isn’t much wrong with the photography. Personal fave is the last pic -very sharp and a perfect pose.
Nice did you know all these people?
I love ektar. As long as you don’t mess up the exposure it is really wonderful.
I’ll sometimes see a blue cast to my photos. Not sure if it happens when I underexposure, or just when I am lazy while doing the color correction during post processing.
Hey, thanks for the link.
Ektar has changed my shooting. After a long nearly black and white only spell, I now carry a second camera loaded with Ektar.
Ha! I have five rolls of Portra and am now finally deciding to load them. Course, I’ve shot maybe four rolls of color negative film in the past five years before this, so they’re all quite new to me. I’m liking the results though. Definitely need to add more color to my M6’s diet.
i have five rolls of ektar but when i’m at the point when i’m making the decision as to what to load i default to the portra. totally gonna try some.
love the voigt 28/2.0.
Stupendous! I love your color work!