Ektachrome 100: Metering & Family Memories

Sooo anyone who saw our Cam & Sam video on YouTube knows that I under and over exposed most of my first roll of Ektachrome. I was pretty disappointed with the results, and over the following months I kept seeing these gorgeous images people were making with this beautiful new film stock! Salt in the wound. Also, I had exposed my blunder to the ruthless world of YouTube, so the need for redemption was real.

Positive Film vs. Negative Film

Slide film is a whole other beast when it comes to film photography! With negative film you have a lot of room for over-exposure as you are simply increasing the reaction between light and the emulsion - basically giving the shadows in your image more detail. With slide film it is easy to over-expose your photo and wash out the highlights. You can read more of the technical stuff and pros and cons here. For me personally, the things that make slide film appealing are not only the gorgeous, accurate colour rendition and contrast (when shot correctly) but also the fact that anybody can pick up the developed film, even once my body has passed away, and see the moments that I captured. That’s what was in my mind as I shot these rolls of my family.

Woah, one solid IPA deep and I’m getting all sentimental here.

Metering Techniques

I shot these two rolls on the same trip, same subject matter, one at a time, but using different cameras and metering techniques. It was a bit of an experiment. I’ll outline both methods here chronologically alongside some examples.

Roll 1 - Smartphone Metering App

Shot on my Minolta XE-1 with the 45mm f/2 lens. I used the Lumu app for iPhone (without the attachment), set to 100 ISO. I metered for the overall scene (pointing the metering camera at the scene I was going to photograph), and at certain times metered for the highlights (pointing the metering camera at the brightest part of the scene).

A bunch of these were shot at the beach and I love the way the colours of the water came out. Super realistic.

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For the following sunset shot I metered for the sky, to retain those sunset colours. I basically just held the meter so I could only see sky (to avoid the shadow areas affecting the meter reading).

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Roll 2 - In-Camera Meter

Shot on my trusty Olympus XA which uses aperture-priority only. Choose the aperture and the camera chooses the shutter speed. I set the meter to 125 ISO (1/3 stop under 100 ISO).

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In this shot, the meter has technically done a good job of exposing for a value in-between the shadows and the highlights. I would’ve liked to have kept the blue colour of the water, so in the future for a shot like this I would set the ISO to 200 (to trick the meter into under-exposing).

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I really like this film.

I was not expecting to like it this much but I’m really glad I gave myself a second chance to meter for this film properly. It’s ability to give very realistic colours, combined with a nice amount of saturation and very fine grain have definitely won me over. The skin tones also came out very natural and the beauty of the developed film itself is an added bonus. Might have to get some mounts so we can view it in the slide projector!

At 100 ISO this is probably not a film I will use for every day shooting, thought I don’t think it was designed for that. We’ve got plenty of other film for this - Portra 400, Ilford HP5, T-Max P3200, to name a few. I’ll stick to those for my every day carry, for their ability to be shot almost anywhere. But when I want that glorious natural colour, extra sharpness, and the light is good, I’ll be reaching for E100.

Thanks as always to The Black and White Box for supplying the film and the top notch dev+scans.

-Sam