Its Week 25 for me and this is another roll put through Canon Elan 7N. I chose this camera because I trust it to make excellent exposures and I was testing my first roll of Ektar 100 which I hear is fussy when it comes to exposure. I shot it at box speed with a few made through a 50/1.4 lens and most with a 100/2.8 macro. I have split the roll between 52 Rolls and my own blog and the others are publishing simultaneously at this link – that post has some architectural shots from a winery as well.
These pictures are taken in my yard, with my granddaughter discovering the joys of salmonberries, a native plant that produces juicy and mild flavoured berries early in the spring. Salmonberries come in a couple of range of colour variations as you can see here. This roll is a bit sad for me to look at as my granddaughter and her family have moved to central Vancouver Island. They are now a 3 hour drive (formerly 5 minutes) away and these photos were taken on their move weekend. We babysat while they packed and moved.
I found the Ektar to be very tricky to scan, it took a couple of tries to get close. And anything to do with skin tones was horrible and I did not discover how to correct that during scanning. I had to spend time correcting those shots in Lightroom to something I could live with. Even so, I think I could come to like this film a lot, it is so vibrant and rich in colour. But it will take a bit of getting used to and since it is much more expensive than most other readily available negative film, I am not sure I will shoot it very often.
It sure is fine-grained though, and that is very much in its favour for certain applications, like macro or telephoto work which often benefits from a crop. The series of images below starts at full size and works down to a 1:1 crop, the photo was made hand-held and I don’t know what the shutter speed was, but looks like it was at f2.8 so probably around 1/3,000th. For the 1:1 crop there is no clarity or sharpening added though the highlights are pulled down a touch (that would be a scanning error) and I think there was a low-level of sharpening during scanning. For the others there is a touch of clarity and sharpening added in Lightroom. The image was scanned at 3200DPI as a jpeg. Camera shake and jpeg conversion probably explains some of the lack of clarity in the 1:1 crop. It is pretty hard to argue that this medium is significantly inferior to a DSLR image especially given it is not a perfect shot to begin with.
To open a large view of any image in the gallery below, click on it and navigate with the arrows to the others
52 rolls 
Reblogged this on burnt embers and commented:
This post is my companion to today’s other post – the rest of the roll of Ektar. It has lots of pictures of my granddaughter and berries and flowers, and also a series of crops to show how fine the grain is. Click on one of the links to go to the post and see the rest of the images.
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Beautiful series! Not to mention that Ektars color, contrast and (pretty much non existing) grain never ceases to amaze me.
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Thanks AKOB. Interesting film for sure but you pay the price with it being intolerant of operator error!
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Nice berry shots and the skin came out fine. I accidentally shot a roll of 120 Ektar at EI 400 and it looked normal, so its not that fussy
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Thanks Graham. That is interesting as it runs contrary to a near unanimous opinion on the internet that it is fussy. I have no experience to judge yet, but perhaps should be running some tests to see for myself.
As to the skin, it only came out fine because of a lot of work in Lightroom to make it so. I might have got to the same spot with a third or fourth try with the scanner software, but that is so much more work than for any other colour film I have used, except some nearly dead expired colour film.
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Simply beautiful. I’m thinking about getting ready for flowers in a month or two. I am in two minds about Ektar for flowers, and sometimes prefer Portra 160. On the one hand there is a lusciousness with Ektar but the softer tones and extra speed of Portra can make a difference.
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Thank you Peter. I am back on the grid after a job in a wild and remote place so getting caught up on comments. Having only shot one roll of Ektar I am not all that sure about the best uses for it. I am pretty sure I need a different scanning workflow to get the most from it and some other films I use.
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Open Source Blog site – Open up source at Google with news regarding Google’s
open source jobs and programs.
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