A Journey into Colour

I have this intention of writing a quick and dirty post about my first (technically not but for the purposes of this let’s pretend) journey into colour film. We all know I can waffle for the gods on my other articles so whether it turns out like that in the end remains to be seen. We’ll start with a little introduction and then get straight into the images shall we? Marvellous.

I love all things black and white when it comes to film, it’s my heart. I don’t think it’s actually a very popular opinion on the whole judging from how many times I get asked the question “but why don’t you do colour?” but in my mind it’s the dog’s bollocks of film photography. To me there’s more depth, tone and texture that brings an image to life in black and white but I can totally see why people tend to lean towards colour, especially when an image pops and jumps out at you. Also I am a bit of a rainbow on acid kind of person in real life so I also think it’s hard for people to process the mind fuckery of someone like me shooting entirely in black and white but here we are.

I am down with the processing of black and white, tried and tested and got my shit together there (always room to grow of course). So lately I’ve been thinking hmm I wonder what it would be like to develop colour, which I’ve never done. I’ve shot colour before but never gone through the process from start to finish and I know I’ve improved a stack since I last shot it. I’ve mused on this for a while and decided to just shoot something, get it developed somewhere and if I like it then go do some more and actually learn how to develop it myself. Next level shit innit. I bought some C41 film to start with (Kodak Portra 160) and then my eye caught the slide film so I excitedly bought one of them as well (Kodak Ektachrome e100). I was warned when I bought it that I wouldn’t be able to get it developed anywhere but I wasn’t really paying attention enough to register that information because my head was filled with the joys of positive negatives (I’ve seen them before they’re cool as fuck).

So of course the Ektachrome was the first to go in the chamber and just to be safe I put it in the spare back while I was shooting black and white as normal in the main one. Another thing was I’ve not shot with this back for a while because it has a bit of a tendency to have a wobble and overlap so I didn’t want to risk a beloved black and white film on it. The experimentation into colour also happened to coincide with the first outing of my new 180mm lens I got for hassy so in actual fact the very first picture taken with the 180mm was also taken with the Ektachrome, which you will see in just a second (honest).

Just before we get to the actual images I will say that it became apparent this week what that vital information was I’d closed my ears to when buying the film. Turns out there is no professional development services for E6 film in Iceland. Like the whole of Iceland. The funniest part of it being there was one company that did it but they stopped when their machine broke down. This is SO Iceland, I’m discovering, which I also find hilarious. Thankfully social media has come to the rescue this time and one of my fellow film photographers in Iceland kindly offered to develop it for me (shout out to Odinn).

So without further ado and waffle from me I’ll go through the whole roll now. These are straight from the scanner with no editing, a thing I NEVER do because I only want people to see my finished work but I wanted you to see the colours as they come out on the film because (spoiler alert) they’re fucking awesome. Here we go…