Agfa Ultra 100

It has been several months since my last post. Several life changes have occurred, such as accepting a new job IRL. But one thing that has not changed is my love of photography. In late February I remembered there was a bag of 35mm film in my freezer. Film? Why film? Why is it in your freezer? In another lifetime I worked as a photographer (digital, 35mm, 120) but have long since neglected that passion only to have it resurface occasionally. Just for giggles I decided to pick up one of the last professional 35mm autofocus bodies Pentax produced -- in this case, a MZ-S and also a 28-105mm kit lens.

The camera is flawless, and the lens shows some signs of use. However for my purposes, there is no reason to spend thousands of dollars on equipment to only be used occasionally. (The image above is from Amazon.)

Which brings us to the title of this post: Agfa Ultra 100. For those who don't know, there are several companies still in existence today which still produce photographic films - Kodak and Fujifilm to name a couple. However, Agfa was unable to survive the transition to digital photography in the early to mid-2000's and only exists today in name only. Here in the United States, Kodak and Fuji are household names; while Agfa never gained notoriety in the states. The emulsion Ultra 100 was touted to be the most color intense color negative film they produced at that time (and possibly offering more saturation than even Kodak Ektar or even Fujifilm Velvia) - but thats another topic for another day. Why would I want to shoot with a film with such high saturation? The simple answer is: I have it preserved in my freezer, why not?

Of course shooting with film which has expired nearly 20 years ago forced me to do some research for adjusting for degradation; however there really shouldn't be much since it has been on ice since 2010. However, I did set the exposure compensation to +0.5 to adjust for any possible degradation of the emulsion.

Earlier this month it was probably the first "nice day" in terms of weather this year. It was sunny, breezy, and 75F. Days like this generally mark the beginning of the end of winter in this region; something which I am truly grateful for. The high resolution scans were provided by the photo lab I use. Due to the analog nature of film, none of these images are filtered, cropped, or rotated, only scaled down to become blog/web friendly. Thats part of the magic of shooting on film, you never know what you're going to get. It removes the instant gratification of seeing that result. And to a degree, one might argue digital has created some laziness in photography since most people don't have to force themselves to think about things like "color balance, ISO, composition, which film stock is appropriate, which paper for printing, which lab does what, etc." I sound like a film-maxi (something which I am not!).

Anyway, enough rambling. Enjoy the images from my town. Agfa Ultra 100 proved itself to be worthy of the task at hand. In this case documenting mostly murals and graffiti. The film's high saturation is conducive to this type of project.