Cloudy conditions can be as useful as the sunniest day for testing colour films.
I’ve learned the likes of Kodak’s Gold 200 and Ultramax 400 can pull pleasing colour out of the dullest daylight. On days like this, markets and the light displays in shops can offer some relief from the grey.
I loaded my third roll of Lucky Color 200 in a Contax Aria. I bought this camera shortly before the pandemic; made by Kyocera in Japan (who also owned Yashica), the Aria is a small, feature-packed SLR with a fantastic exposure system and superb Zeiss-made lenses. It’s a camera that’s become a staple on holidays, and holidays usually mean sunny weather and colour film.
I took the Lucky-packed Aria down to Deptford, near Greenwich across the aptly named Deptford Creek. Deptford was one of the districts that grew alongside London’s expanding docks in the Elizabethan age. It was the home of ship building and warehouses, depots and docks as London’s dockyards grew and then declined. Heavily damaged in the bombings of The Blitz, it declined; it has since become famous for its ethnic shops and the huge street market that takes place in the high street three times a week.
The Contax is manual focus but has motorised film advance; the advance is a little quieter than many of the motor-driven cameras of the time. The lenses Zeiss made for Kyocera’s Contax cameras included a small “pancake” 45mm f/2.,8 lens that I often use for street photography. The lens is a Three-element Tessar design and is sharp but not too sharp.
This day had started bright but the cloud had rolled in enough to dial the brightness down.
One of my favourites is this image of the discarded Lime bike, as annoying in Deptford as it is anywhere else in London. The colour in the pavement is edging near too purple straight from the scans but could be rescued with colour correction. The Lime’s garish-green colour scheme is bright without being over-saturated.
Testing a colour film in autumn light will always be a bit of a compromise – and the results will of course be very different in stronger light, as the pics taken on the FED-3 showed.
The Contax’s high-quality lens is more likely to show serious aberrations with the film, and apart from the purple tone in the uncorrected pics, the results from this roll, I think are pretty promising.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
