Tips on shooting Ektar

MattKing said:

I recall Ron Mowrey (Photo Engineer) posted that the original Ektar 25 had lousy keeping properties, which was a major reason for its short production life.

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There are some threads on Photo.net where Ektar 25 was discussed with Ron and Joe Manthey chiming in. See e.g. here: https://www.photo.net/forums/topic/172826-kodak-ektar-25-what-was-it-designed-for/ Not sure if the shelf life was discussed; you'd have to do some reading here and there.
Btw, I'm assuming you mean shelf life of unprocessed film, not the keeping properties of processed negatives.

Timely thread as just yesterday I decided to give Ektar 100 another go. I shot a roll several years ago but was a little disappointed, however in hindsight it may have been a processing error. Every frame came out with a yellow cast which seemed not to be a scanning artifact. Different lenses, different lighting, slight over and under exposure on various frames - no significant difference. Scans from one lab and prints from another both have a yellow tint.

Anyhow, I’ll be using a different lab this time, plus correction filters as discussed here. Hopefully it works out better!

Many years ago I shot one roll of Royal Gold 25 (internet says same/similar to Ektar 25) and the resulting prints really surprised me. This was in the time of questionable drugstore mini labs, but those prints really shined. Too bad I can’t say as much for my choice of subject, misguided snaps of random things, though 2-3 are pretty nice regardless. I think it may be possible that photographers now (never minding my lack of skill then) might consider the look “too digital”, as in grainless, somewhat high contrast, and glossy. But back then it was a revelation: super high quality from 35mm print film!

I’d love to get that from the current Ektar 100.

MattKing said:

I recall Ron Mowrey (Photo Engineer) posted that the original Ektar 25 had lousy keeping properties, which was a major reason for its short production life.

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Ron was never involved with any Ektar film design or production, so I'm not sure that he had "inside" knowledge about it. Ektar/Royal Gold 25 was not very popular because of its speed; its demise was inevitable. It did not have "lousy keeping properties."

Phoneo.net has some great contributions done in the 2000s by PE and Ron Andrews; I have been curious trying to find those references and got quite an exact one regarding Ektar 25 in this thread. Also, he posted about C41 films having newer generation couplers. Being 2017, E100 might have inherited the couplers from the Ektar-Portra line. The crystallization might be as well related to the one happening when freezing this film.

Photo Engineer said:

Ektar 25 had a problem with uniformity from batch to batch with respect to keeping. The coupler droplets in some batches would form crystals that magnified the grain. It could get so bad that the surface took on a matte appearance. I first saw this in a large sample from a production coating brought to our offices to show us way back then. It was spotty as well, being non-uniform across the coating web of 42".

The film itself, and the dyes were quite stable.

PE

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As Ektar 25 and many beloved films are well gone, and already some decades ago, my bet is mostly in current production films.

It has been a while since I shot Ektar. I have mostly done hybrid output from C41 and looking at some of my shots, home scanned/flatter profile lab TIFFs seem to bring a milder version of Ektar; it can easily come scanned as too high contrast. I used to do some long exposures and it seemed to behave a bit like chrome films picking the different (green) color casts of mercury vapor light. Long ago I recall these examples: https://rangefinderforum.com/threads/kodak-ektar-vs-portra-160.109360/

Been lurking the thread otherwise. I have stocked up on 120 Portra 160 so far, but Ektar in 120 seems to have moved slowly after the price increases and some dealers are selling discounted expired/short dated. I might pick some and freeze it awaiting the colourful seasons and trips.

Prest_400 said:

I have been curious trying to find those references and got quite an exact one regarding Ektar 25 in this thread.

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Thanks - that was probably the sort of reference I recalled (partially correctly).

MattKing said:

Thanks - that was probably the sort of reference I recalled (partially correctly).

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Ahh yeah; that was the thread where I got a bit irritated, shall we say, and shot my mouth off a bit.

Regarding Ektar 25, we (the outfit where I worked) actually did some trials on it at the time. Our main business was high-volume portrait work in a studio chain so "pleasant" skin tone reproduction under professional electronic flash was a major consideration.

Something the company had done perhaps a handful of years prior was to change from 70mm to 35mm film. A change that I was never too happy about on a quality basis. But... it cut film cost roughly in half, and it was, after all, a business. So if we can regain some of that lost detail I, along with the more serious "photo people" in the operation are for it.

We did some side by side tests vs either VPSII or III, whatever was the film of the day. Ektar 25 in our standard long-roll 35mm studio cameras vs long-roll 70mm VPS in a full-70 portrait camera (I'm thinking probably a Nord SLR model). I know I said we had converted to 35mm but we probably still had several hundred 70mm systems in operation; enough to keep a dedicated 70mm cine processor in operation.

So we started with our usual regimen of film tests... latent-image-shift tests to establish a minimum shoot-to-process hold time (you have to know that the color is relatively stable before doing critical color tests). Then some exposure series so we know for sure what is a "normal" exposure.

Finally studio shooting with live models, color targets, and a variety of "standard" colored fabrics. Same scene(s) shot on 35mm Ektar 25 vs full-70mm VPS (II or III). Film processed in tightly controlled machines along with control strips. Then prints are made, professional color papers were all we used. Typically we'd use 8x10" prints for color eval (they're easy to handle); larger prints for further eval. First get best color balance on "normal exposure" VPS (whatever it is), then hand-balance everything else for best match in flesh highlights.

The results... from my fuzzy recollection. First, I was a bit astounded at how much detail the Ektar 25 carried through. As I recall the 35mm Ektar 25 was at least in the same ballpark as the 70mm VPS (whatever it was). But... most likely we shot the Ektar 25 with a couple stops wider lens aperture so this was probably a factor.

But... the skin tone reproduction, as I recall, was fairly miserable. It was bad enough that we would not even consider doing a studio trial. I don't think I was involved in the discussions with Kodak, but my understanding was that this film was never gonna be able to have the skin tone capabilities of VPS. The 70mm VPS printed to 8x10" on a pro paper had just beautiful skin tones.

So... Ektar 25 is something we never pursued farther.

jmrochester said:

Ron was never involved with any Ektar film design or production, so I'm not sure that he had "inside" knowledge about it. Ektar/Royal Gold 25 was not very popular because of its speed; its demise was inevitable. It did not have "lousy keeping properties."

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Hi, obviously you have some special knowledge about these things. Fwiw I have a copy of Kodak pub E-107 (1990) which gives some image stability data for Kodak films. I'm not sure if Kodak ever put this online, but I think that Henry Wilhelm may have reproduced at least part of it in his book. Fwiw.

They put Ektar 25 in the same general dye stability class as Gold 100 and Gold 200 films, with yellow as the limiting dye.

Fwiw I used to keep some sample negatives in my desk that my department had produced for our internal printer setup sets. (I never bothered to "clean house.") After some years it occurred to me to compare against the predictions in pub.E-107. The specific ones I looked at were on VPSIII, which was in a better stability class. We had a temperature and humidity controlled building which was fairly close to conditions reported in E-107.

I was a little surprised at how close the predictions were. My real world negatives tracked near the center of the predicted "envelope" for yellow dye density. I more or less kept this up for over 30 years, taking a reading every 3 or 4 or 5 years. So this gave the test procedures a lot of credence in my view.

Lol, I was part of the small team that designed the yellow-forming layer, i.e., blue sensitive layer, of Ektar 25. In order to meet a particular design requirement, an older yellow coupler needed to be used, so I don't doubt anything you say about dye stability. I also agree with your statements about skin tones. The film was not meant to be a portraiture film but rather an image structure statement. Skin tones were made as good as possible given the other requirements.

jmrochester said:

Lol, I was part of the small team that designed the yellow-forming layer, i.e., blue sensitive layer, of Ektar 25.

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Very cool. No doubt it was an incredible film; I wished it could have held on. My hat is off to all of the Kodak film designers/engineers. Well actually to a great many others inside of Kodak...paper design teams, process designers, environmental control researchers, the electronic designers from back in the days of the VCNAs and later PVACs and things like Bremson Data Systems and Kodak's color science. Way too much to mention. But I digress...

Why would you want Ektar 25 still around? It was doomed anyway due to its color idiosyncrasies. People turned to chromes instead for fidelity. Ektar 100 is a much better product in every respect, and in fact, can worthily compete with many chrome applications.

DREW WILEY said:

Why would you want Ektar 25 still around?

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I should have said "I wish it could have held on IN THE HOPE THAT THE COLOR WOULD BE IMPROVED."

A video I made up a couple years ago from some rolls I shot in 2008 and posted here at the time. Doesnt go into detail between Ektar 25 (In this case Royal Gold 25) and Ektar 100. Just shows some samples of the two.

Since I haven't shot Ektar in the twilight of the evening, does it need a cooling filter, or is it sufficient just to shoot it naked?

Crossover on the warm side is less a risk. I can't give a thorough technical answer; but so far, I haven't used a cooling filter, and have gotten some remarkably accurate twilight colors, even the remarkably subtle gold-bronzes of tropical seashore sunsets and deep yellow and red blends of high altitude alpenglow sunsets. Therefore, I don't even bother to carry any cooling filters, even though I own a full set. They might be appropriate for certain kinds of indoor artificial lighting, however.