Tales on Film

The last days, there are a lot of articles in the news concerning the stock of Kodak. Investors have lost faith in the company that started the photography for the masses about 131 years ago, the stocks has plummet about 85 procent in the last week and if we look further back, the stock of Kodak has gone down from 80,25 points in 1997 to 1,33 today. That accounts for a loss of 99,5% in the last 15 years.

Most of you know the timeline of Kodak, George eastman Kodak invented the roll film and marketed with the now famous line: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Since then the company became the biggest camera and film producer in the world. In 1975 an engineer from Kodak invented the digital camera. But Kodak only got in the digital business around 2000, that was a capital mistake and that’s where the big decline of the stock began.

If Kodak would go bankrupt, I would guess they will not disappear, but they’ll downsize. I don’t know what they are going to downsize, but I don’t think they will drop the film line. Kodak still makes a lot of film for motion pictures and they just released several new films in the last year. That’s a clear indication that there still is hope for the color films produced by Kodak. I would guess that they are probably going to kill of the black and white film, because there hasn’t been a new film in a while and they have been dropping b/w films consistently lately.

I don’t know what the future will bring, but I rather certain that kodak won’t go down without a fight…

I really wanted to try the new Kodak portra 400 film, but in Belgium I could not yet find it in the stores, because Kodak first wants to exhaust the Kodak portra 400NC stock. So I just called Kodak Benelux and asked where I could buy some. The rep of Kodak, that I got on the phone, was kind enough to send me a sample pakket, an unexpected but nice surprise. So a couple of days later DHL rang the doorbell and handed me a pakket with 2 rolls of 120 film and 1 roll of 135 film.

Because I already saw a lot of people review the film itself, I decided to find out how the 135 film behaved when pushed to its limits. So, I loaded the film in my Pentor Super TL and set out during the last day of carnival in Aalst to shoot at boxspeed of 400 asa and up to 3200 asa. Back home I developed the whole roll in Digibase C-41 and pushed it 3 stops in development, as if the film was rated at 3200 instead of 400. One thing I can tell you, I was very surprised by the results.

This was shot at asa 400 (correct exposure) and developed with 3 stops extra. As you can see it handles overexposure very well.

This was shot at 800 asa (underexposed 1 stop) and developed the same as above.

Shot at 1600 (underexposed 2 stops), same development as above

Shot at 3200 (underexposed 3 stops), same development as above

As you click on the images, on flickr you can look at them on a 2400 dpi scan, you’ll notice that not only is the grain very small. It is about the same as when you would develop a kodak portra 400NC at normal speed. The overexposure adds some more saturation and a bit more contrast, but I kind of like the look of it, so I will definitely shoot this film again at 3200

Not only does the portra 400 has a small grain even when pushed, it also has a high dynamic range. This picture is taken at sunset, which you can see on the building. The lights at the bottom of the photo were shining so bright, that it was hard looking at them directly. But even under those conditions you still see detail in the highlights and in the shadows.

Just a small disclaimer, I did do a bit of adjustment on these pictures, because my scanner did not handle the colors very well. Mainly because the Silverfast software that I’m using doesn’t has the appropriate profile to scan the new portra. I did not use any noise reduction tool or setting.