Concurring with Jim Grey’s assessment on his blog “Down the Road”, this film is not one I am fond of. The colors are muted and take on a greenish cast. I fiddled with the color balance slightly in Lightroom but removing it is not easy. These images were shot this summer on the coast of Maine.
My gifted Leica M3 and 50mm Rigid Summicron will be sent off to DAG Camera this week for a restoration. It will be a worthwhile investment. I shot several comparison images made with my modern 50mm Summicron and the Rigid version, and don’t see much difference. The new versjon seems to deal with highlights better and I think that is because of the less than stellar condition of the Rigid’s lens elements. The newer version is minimally sharper. The Rigid is more stout, made entirely of brass. Having taken the Rigid apart, the simplicity of the lens was striking.
I constantly load film into a camera without attaching a memo or film box piece to the back. I have had several different cameras loaded with film and am on a mission to empty all of them. A roll was loaded into my M6 with the ISO set at 6400. Sure I did not intend to push 3200 film, I rewound it and sure enough it was a roll of TriX. Kerri at Kerri’s Warwick Photo used her film puller to reset the roll for me.
Kerri is fantastic. She just purchased a brand new film processing machine and state of the art scanner. Development and scanning costs are very fair. I am glad to support her local business. Kerri color balances the imagery in an expert way. And most important the negatives and scans return to me with no dust. I am very frustrated with dust intrusion during home development of black and white film. If I remember to turn on the shower with very hot water for a few minutes before unspooling and hanging the film, I tend to minimize the dust pretty well. When the dust finds its mark, editing it out is a tedious process. For this reason, I will use Kerri to develop my black and white film also even though she sends that (and slide film) out to another lab. A recent Ilford FP4 roll from her lab came back beautifully done and sparkling clear.
Onto the Kodak ProImage pics. These were shot with a Nikon F6 and Sigma 35mm F 1.4. This lens is a frustrating one. Autofocus is very hit and miss to the point where I gave up using it. I am going to sell this lens.
Post processing of this film is a challenge. Here is an image I color balanced, with the settings. There is still too much magenta, but the skin tones are better…Ugh.
Highlights -45 Whites +45 Blacks -10 Green Saturation -10 Magenta Saturation -44 Yellow Saturation -49 Red Luminance +18 Yellow Luminance -17 Orange Luminance +18 Green Luminance +33 Magenta Luminance +26 Green Hue -26
I’m relieved in a way that your ProImage photos have the same greenish cast as mine, as that means it’s endemic to the film and not something about my cameras or the processor I use!
Yes Jim you can rest easy now! Some of the images actually have vibrant colors, contrary to my post. There are a few others in the roll with nice colors. Those I shot in extreme fog came out muddy, I did not overexpose enough. I raised the exposure in post by 2 stops for the image of the little boy running on the beach – this fulfills what I hoped to capture in the camera. This film is an acquired taste. I would not suggest it for portraits. It is good for seascapes. Images shot with Portra @ISO 200 of the same scenes (earlier post) are much more pleasing to my eye – they have a softer quality.