Looking at the shadows on some of my duller and bluer shots, the light was there. It was just sometimes coming from the wrong direction. Perhaps by about 90 degrees or so. Not by enough to ruin a colour negative shot, but seemingly enough with slide film. I could have been more patient and waited for 36 flawlessly lit scenes across a whole week instead of just getting through the roll with the best of what I was given over two days. It makes a lot of sense – for all the good things we had to say about Ektar 100’s extreme saturation and contrast, these traits aren’t always the best fit for photos of people.

Ektar is an ideal choice for commercial photographers and for advanced amateurs. Due to its vivid colours, Ektar film will work very well for nature, travel and outdoor photography. Equally, it will suit fashion and product photography. In short, I can’t really argue with what they promise. The shot of Shanghai Library in particular shows off the sharpness, especially in the windows on the right-hand side of the tower, and also that grain. World’s finest? I don’t know. Very fine? For sure. The modern Kodak Ektar 100 is a color negative film introduced in 2008 as a successor to the original Ektar. Like that older film, current Kodak Ektar is specialized for applications in which ultra-fine grain and high color saturation are desirable traits. It’s only available as an 100 ISO film (keeps that pesky market unsegmented), but it comes in multiple formats – 35mm, 120 medium format, and in 4×5 and 8×10 sheets. Then when going into Natural Light on a semi-cloudy day, you get pretty darn vibrant colors. Canon’s older lenses however are designed with a bit more muted tones in mind. That’s why they’re so popular amongst a select few.

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Perhaps the next time I shoot some Ektachrome, I’ll do all of the above. But for this one, I just wanted to shoot it as normal – and by that I mean as I would a colour negative film – and see how it turned out. Maybe like an experiment to set a baseline for my knowledge of what to do and what not to do with it.

You can certainly increase the contrast when editing any type of film, but there is something unique-looking about the contrast that naturally occurs in photos taken on Kodak Ektar. They are sharp and punchy. In my tests, I think that this film needs a lot of daylight. I’m specifically using that term “daylight” because I’m referring to both the specific white balance and the specific light. This means that a flash is totally perfectly fine here in case you’re shooting portraits. If you have a monolight in a light modifier of some sort, ensure that you go with a white interior to keep the light color neutral. Silver interiors will offer a weird color shift at times.Once again here we can see the brilliant blue tones in the water, with the deep greens in the vegetation, and those dusty earth tones in the foreground. Kodak Ektar 100’s incredible skin tones With so many different films still available and each with their own characteristics, I think understanding where a film doesn’t shine is as important as talking about where it does.