A color brute.

I made mention of Kodak’s Ektar 100 film here when I first started messing about with film after a decades long hiatus spent genuflecting to the digital god.

This is not an easy film to use. The contrast is brutally high and even a smidgeon of over-exposure means highlights will blow out and there is no way the limitations of the film medium will permit their recovery in post-processing.

So I have learned to set the Nikon F100 to -0.3 stops exposure correction using the +/- control and expect that for the next roll I will migrate to -0.7 stops, meaning I am rating Extar at 160 ASA and recovering detail thus in Lightroom:

Here’s an image snapped in Prescott AZ the other day – any hint of over-exposure would have blown that roof out:

Sure, the sky came out darker than it really was, but Extar is about drama, not realism. I get enough of the latter from the NYT daily, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm AFD Nikkor, Kodak Ektar 100.