Ektar 100 vs E100: A full sun portrait battle royale.

It’s a cool Melbourne winters day. Hope is returning to the city as lock down restrictions are eased (wasn’t that a glorious short-lived freedom), and we are all in a rush to reschedule postponed shoots.

With the unpredictable weather patterns Victoria is blessed with, I throw a couple of rolls of 100 speed 120 in my bag and pray for sunshine. And sunshine is what we got! Full midday sun, the perfect slow Kodak light. I load up the Mamiya c330 with Ektar, pick up Lola and the showdown begins. The location and model, with a lot of muted browns, bright red features and blue skies needed a high colour saturation to get the desired look.

As you can see both films performed admirably in the conditions. The Mamiya decided to have a dummy spit towards the end of the E100 roll and required a bit of a love tap to get going again, losing a couple of frames in the process but we still got exactly what we came for plus more.

We shot in full sun and part shade throughout the session and mostly metered for the light falling on the skin. Most shots were taken with the 80mm f2.8, but there were a few using the 135mm f4.5. Its quite easy to see where colour negative film really excels over its slide counterparts. The extra latitude and shadow details aren’t immediately noticeable but when correcting I noticed that the E100 suffered from colour shifts when trying to lift the shadows. But the crushed shadows are great and I prefer to keep the darker areas as they are.

After getting the negatives back from the lab, the first thing I did was hold the E100 up to the sunlight. If you haven’t shot colour transparency film then do it. There really is no way to describe how beautiful the colours are, and it has me in wonderment every single time.

All these images were scanned at home on an Epson v550 with minimal post corrections. While I can see a difference between the two stocks, and I really like the correctly exposed images from the E100. The Ektar 100 will remain one of my go to emulsions with a great price, low cost of developing and exceptional colours.

As of writing, I have secured another 10 rolls of E100 in 35mm and will follow-up with better metered images with more care in the scans. I feel like I have not done the emulsion justice just yet.