I’m currently playing with a bag of expired, in most cases long-expired, colour film. It’s all C41 process so I’ve also resumed colour processing at home too. There are some colour motion picture film stocks though that use an alternative, ECN2, process. I’d read a lot about one particular film stock, Kodak Vision 3, so I decided to give it a try. I chose a 250 ISO daylight balanced version and bought it from Nik and Trick down on the south coast. They also offer an excellent ECN2 processing service too but only for films they’ve supplied so it made sense to opt for their film.
We were away for a few days back in June and so I popped the first roll, highlights from which form this post, into the camera and headed into the sunshine of Wrexham. Once I’d finished the roll, the film went back down to the south of England and a couple of weeks later (N&Ts ECN2 is a bespoke hand-processed service) I received my scans via email and the negatives followed a few days later in the post.
The first thing I noticed was that many of the images are over exposed. Was this the film or me? I strongly suspect the latter. I use a cold shoe-mounted light meter generally although do wing it occasionally. Insofar as I can remember I used the meter for these so it’s possible that I set an incorrect ISO and was therefore set up to over expose. Something to be careful of with roll two and I will be extra careful with metering.
A degree of over-exposure can be easily dealt with in post-production and so I made a rare trip to the computer and looked at the images in Photoshop. My approach to post processing on the computer, or tablet for that matter, is simple – if it takes more than a couple of minutes to process then it’s not worth doing. I used to spend hours processing digital images and thoroughly enjoyed the process but not any more. Thankfully, a quick tweak was all these needed.
So, exposure issues aside (probably user error but I’m keeping an open mind) I have to say that overall I do like the colour tones this film produced. I will copy some of the the negatives myself and process them through NLP in Lightroom to see whether I can replicate the scans supplied by Nik & Tricks’ professional set up. If I can it might save me a few pounds on scanning costs (I went all out and paid for large TIFFs for this first roll).
As the image above shows, a touch of over-exposure might not be such a bad thing with this film. Compared to the rest of the roll this looks to have received the “correct” exposure and the resulting image is not as clean as the over exposed frames. I’m looking particularly at the shadows and to some degree the skin tones. I will perhaps try rating the second roll at 200. I might also use one of my Canon SLRs to take advantage of the excellent onboard auto-exposure mode.
I guess the key question is would I use this film again? One answer would be “yes” … I’ve three more rolls in the cellar! Another might be a cautious “probably”. I do like what I’ve seen so far but one roll, with problematic exposure, isn’t enough to form an opinion (I know, some YT influencers can do it on one roll). Roll two is loaded into the Canon EOS 1 and unless I read something to the contrary I will probably rate it at ISO 200. Wish me luck!
Dave's Place 