Color Film Bonanza - with 35mm and 4x5

The last few days I have spent the evenings scanning a couple of 35mm rolls of color negative film and developing some color 4x5 images. The 4x5 sheets are a menagerie of shots from the last few months, but mostly a few recent shots.

I discovered an interesting quality from some cheap old Kodak Gold 400 film. This is normally stuff I wouldn't touch for serious use, but when I did some color correction in Photoshop it ended up being some really nice film, much to my surprise. It was probably 10-15 years old! I received it along with an old film camera I bought on Ebay.

Here are a few shots from the roll to illustrate how good this old expired stuff can be. All shot with my trusty Nikon SP and 28mm, 50mm, or 85mm lenses. Yes, there is some blue/magenta color shifts in the shadows areas, but to I kind of liked that. After all, shadows are naturally a little blue. But they have a "look" to them that is very interesting to me:

Next are some photos from another roll of 35mm, also expired. This roll is from Fujicolor 100 film, which I have posted before. This stuff is only slightly expired, and for most things is really pretty nice. I have found that underexposing a hair is better than overexposing, unlike most negative film. I totally guessed most of these shots and 95% of them came out fine, even if underexposed by a couple stops!

This roll was primarily to test out two new lenses. I found a deal on two Voigtlander lenses for my Nikon SP - a 21mm and 25mm. They are very close in focal length but I wanted to try them both, so I bought them both. I might resell the 25mm at some point. The Nikon 28mm I have is going to be sold as it is superfluous (and not as great a lens as these modern designs). Here are a few shots, mostly with the 21mm lens, taken around VSU on a rainy day. As you can see, this film tends to be a little warm in color, unlike the expired Kodak Gold:

4x5 film shots after the break!


Now to the good stuff. I developed several sheets of C-41 color negatives in the last couple days. They turned out pretty well, but I still have trouble with some negatives when I scan them. The Agfa T2500 has a serious issue with color negatives. The "preview" looks nothing like the actual finished TIFF scan. So I have to do a lot of color correction and sometimes they just don't come out well.

First are the color negatives I shot in Thomasville a few days ago with either Schneider 150mm or a Nikon 90mm lenses:

And this last one converted to b&w because I just couldn't get the color to look good:

Next up is a photo from way back when I went to Savannah, GA. I am not happy with the scan (see the banding in the sky and dust) but will redo it on a different scanner sometime next week (I have access to an Epson 750 at VSU):

Finally a shot from Bank's Lake in Lakeland taken with a Schneider 47mm XL lens. Not my best by far, I'm still learning how to shoot with such a wide lens and how to deal with all the issues inherent to that:

Look for more color 4x5 shots soon. I just mailed off a batch of E-6 film yesterday so I should have it back next week!