I’ve been writing a bit about my adventures with Black & White film and developing myself. I haven’t (yet) developed my own colour negative (C41 process) film. I do hope to do so at some point in the future – even though I can get the local lab to do it for $4 a roll, it’s nice to be able to do this yourself.

When I was young, I also took photos. I still use that camera sometimes too. Recently I’ve been scanning in the first ever slide film I shot – a roll of Kodachrome when I was 8 years old. I do like the look of Kodachrome, and am sad that it’s going away.

Last year, when I was in the US for Burning Man, I got introduced to Kodak Ektar 100. With the promise of colours that remind you of Kodachrome, I grabbed a bunch and headed to San Francisco and then Burning Man.

I liked the look of a bunch of stuff I shot. For example:

Recently, on my trip to Hong Kong, I shot some too. The above was all shot with an old Ricoh SLR, when I was in Hong Kong I used my Nikon F80 and the 50mm f1.8 lens.

One of my favourites was of this little statue:

In Hong Kong a lot of buildings are interconnected so you can walk between them without having to go outside (where it’s hot and humid). There are bits of sculpture in the buildings around the Rackspace office. This is one near the hotel I was staying with. During the morning and afternoons, these walkways are filled with people, exactly like streets…. but a floor above and indoors.

I’m adding more shots from Hong Kong to my Flickr Photstream as the days go on.

I really like this film. I even don’t mind it for people… the first was the test shot (have I loaded correctly, things winding, wonder if this shot will work) in the hotel lobby in San Francisco. Leah:

I should learn to scan better (I have since, this was probably the first image I scanned using my scanner, certainly the first Ektar frame). Another two people images I like on Ektar are:

Dare I say that I always seem to find the Ektar colours to be relaxed? I like it. The blues really shine through. Reds are also really nice (heck, I even love the yellow), and I plan to go and investigate how I can combine these colours in interesting ways on film.