Like several others who have shared their 5 Frames here, I started my exploration of photography before digital was an option. As a teenager, I shot mostly black and white 35mm film, which I developed and printed myself. Only later in the 1990s when I started shooting professionally did I experiment with color films. While I made a shift toward digital in the last 20 years, I never stopped shooting film, and in the last 2 years, I have moved much of my personal work to large format (4×5 and 8×10).
For reasons both economic and aesthetic, my large format work is almost entirely black and white. But recently, I purchased two 10 packs of Kodak Ektar 100 and let myself just experiment. I took the film with me on a trip to Portland, OR and made a point of always having two film holders (4 frames) loaded with Ektar when I went out shooting. This afforded me several opportunities to shoot at different times of day in different lighting and weather conditions.
The resulting test images were quite impressive in their tone and color. Four frames (above) were shot on a Chamonix F-2 4×5 camera with a Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm f/5.6 lens, with no filters, on a tripod at box speed. Several of the shots were made in low-light of early morning, and required exposures up to 6 seconds (including adjustments for reciprocity failure.) These longer exposures in low light reveal a pronounced blue shift in fog which I find quite beautiful.
Ektar 100 is an excellent fine-grain color negative film that has wonderful saturation and tonal qualities. It does extremely well with long exposures and is reasonably forgiving when it comes to compensating for reciprocity failure. In my 5 frames, I have included one frame (above) to demonstrate a long exposure. It was taken with an Ondu 4×5 (Mk II) pinhole camera which has an aperture around f/217. This exposure took 3 minutes 50 seconds.
Thanks for reading,
~ Leland
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One response to “5 Frames… With Kodak Ektar 100 (EI 100 / 4×5 format / Chamonix F-2 4×5)”
Great images. I have thought of purchasing a Chamonix, I like the sturdy construction of the camera’s base and it looks to be a durable and user friendly (relatively speaking) 4 X 5. But patience and calm are in short supply right now so I have held off. Thanks for the great post.