Nikon F100 with Kodak Ultramax 400

Kodak films have never been particularly exciting to me: they’ve always felt a little staid and understated in their rendition of colour. With something like a ten year gap since I last really shot film, the colour film options available have somewhat reduced: outside of the more exotic cinema 35mm films and other ‘boutique’ films, there are only really a handful of options that are likely be available in more common high-street settings. With that in mind, I’d decided to cast aside my prejudice and give it a go.

Why UltraMax 400 over Gold 200? Frankly, I’d forgotten how film sensitivity mapped to real-world conditions (something that I’m sure the roll of Red Scale I currently have in the F100 will suffer with) and had assumed that ISO200 film wouldn’t be sensitive enough for what I was doing: walking around the UK in April/May. Given the unseasonably bright weather of late, I was broadly incorrect. I’ll never be upset about having a too-fast film given the increased flexibility that it gives me to take photos in more inclement conditions if I need to.

I’m quite happy with my poor memory though: the grain on the UltraMax 400 is quite pleasing, even in well-lit scenarios. I may well just be a mark for grain as an aesthetic choice to cover up my compositional failures, but to my eyes it adds a somewhat painterly quality to images that makes the somewhat dull colour rendition a little more acceptable to me.

The F100 was new to me, following a couple of mishaps with purchases. There’s a somewhat common failure state of the F100 where the body will fail to stop down the lens that I didn’t notice that the first body I obtained had, after loading a roll of XP2 and shooting about half of it. A sale of that body as spares and repairs and a new acquisition after left me with a working body. As a camera, it handles exceptionally well - as you’d expect from a prosumer Nikon body. As my first experience with F-mount bodies, I was perplexed by the decision to have lenses mount with an anticlockwise turn though. Fifty plus years in, it was probably too late to fix that.

The most disappointing thing to me about modern mirrorless cameras is the lack of a satisfying shutter sound and mirror-slap combination. One can talk endlessly about the technical advantages of EVFs in terms of being able to see exactly what the sensor sees in the digital context, but what does that matter if it doesn’t feel like you’re taking a photo? My inexorable decline into gear wank continues.

I like this photo from the front of the Tate Modern, but I wish I’d done a better job of cropping the sign either in or out. 20mm is a challenging focal length to work with, I’ve found: whether this is a particular feature of the Nikkor or not, I don’t know, but the extreme convergence towards the middle from the edges of the frame means that verticals simply don’t work as my mind wants to believe they do. Probably a case of a need to use it more to work out where it works and where it doesn’t. Having been a 50mm favourer most of my life, this will be a change.