In the years I’ve been shooting film, I’ve dabbled in color negative and color positive a bit with my 35mm and medium format cameras, but my main focus has always been black & white. A year or so ago, a really nice dude from Reddit was getting rid of some color negative and slide film in 4x5, and sent me a box of each for free. They were expired, but in deep freeze, and the boxes have been kicking around in my refrigerator for a while now.
The color negative film is an old Kodak emulsion that isn’t in production anymore, called Vericolor II. It’s basically a 125 ISO precursor to Portra. I decided to rate it at 100 just to be safe, as color films often lose sensitivity when they get this old. The slide film is Ektachrome 64D (the D means it’s daylight balanced and not intended to be shot indoors or under tungsten or fluorescent lighting). I rated it at 50 instead of 64 for the same reason.
If you weren’t aware, developing your own color negatives and color slides at home isn’t terribly difficult, especially if you already have some experience with black & white film. There are 2 major differences. First, B&W films and developers have thousands of combinations you can experiment with to get the look you want. Color negative film is developed using the highly standarized C-41 process, which is essentially the same no matter what kind of color negative film you’re using. It was designed to be simple and repeatable so that even your average teenager working at a Walgreens photo lab could get good results, back when rolls of color negative film were sold by the truckload. Slide film is in a similar situation: all slide film that is currently produced is developed in a process designated “E-6.” As an interesting aside, this is why you can’t get Kodachrome slide film developed anymore. It didn’t use the E-6 process, it used a superior and proprietary process called K-14. And yes, 14 refers to the number of separate chemical steps in the process. No wonder it wasn’t cost effective for Kodak to keep Kodakchrome around.
The second major difference is that both C-41 and E-6 are much more temperature sensitive than B&W development. I do make it a point to be pretty careful with keeping my temperature at 68 degrees F when developing B&W films, but if it’s off by 3 degrees or something, that’s not likely to make a noticeable difference in the final negative. Not so with color development. These developers need to run hot, usually just north of 100 degrees F. Being off by even a degree or two will result in noticeable color shifts. For this reason, I picked up a sous vide from the FPP store. The sous vide allows me to make a very accurate and consistent water bath that holds all the bottles of chemicals at the exact right temperature for me. As a bonus, it also makes a mean top sirloin steak.
Pictured: The Kodachrome of food.
With that characteristically long-winded explanation out of the way, let’s take a look at my first results!
4x5 slides are mind-blowingly big.
Couldn’t find my ND grad filter while I was shooting, so I figured I’d preserve the sunrise and let the foreground go to black. And go to black it did.
So I’ve talked before about how I’m not awesome at scanning, and that is extra true of color negative film. As it turns out, 100 ISO was still underexposed, which complicated things. The final result is that the scans were downright embarrassing, and I don’t want to share them here. Fortunately, slide film scans much more easily. The first two shots metered at 50 were too dark. I shot a third one at EI 32 and it came out looking just about right.
One day I’ll actually bother to clone dust out of my film scans. Well… probably not actually.
Now that I’m officially a large format color photographer, I can start looking forward to playing with darkroom printing in color. Stay tuned…