Tag: kodak ultramax 400

This time in Porto … some­thing went ter­ribly wrong. Get­ting back my films from the lab, they wrote that some images were under­ex­posed. See­ing the res­ults, around 1/3rd of the frames were near black and I’m still guess­ing what happened.

The Con­tax 167MT with its Carl Zeiss Dis­tagon 2.8/28mm worked quite well with the Kodak Ultramax 400 film and I was really impressed how flaw­less this combo handles, shoot­ing in aper­ture pri­or­ity mode.

On one situ­ation I noticed, that the aper­ture set­ting on the lens and the aper­ture dis­play in the view­find­er did not match. The view­find­er dis­play showed f/4 when f/11 was set on the lens, which res­ults in an under­ex­posed frame, as the cam­era reduces the shut­ter speed to get a prop­er exposure.

I found out that the lens was not locked prop­erly. Seems, as when tak­ing the cam­era out of the bag, I acci­dent­ally hit the lens release but­ton and unlocked the lens. This was a mess, as I did not know how long the lens was unlocked, as I usu­ally do not check the aper­ture in the view­find­er, know­ing what aper­ture I set on the lens.

Well, this might have explained the issue on one film, but I have 1/3 of the frames ruined on both films I made. I’ll shoot anoth­er roll to see if this beha­viour returns when care­fully watch­ing the lens is locked prop­erly. In addi­tion, some of the ‘well exposed’ frames show massive amount of grain, as if the lab has tried to ‘res­cue’ them.

As I made some digit­al frames besides the ana­log ones, the loss is not dis­astrous, but it annoys me that it happened at all, not noti­cing the aper­ture dis­crep­ancy. I was … too care­less this time. Or maybe I was simply too dis­trac­ted by the beauty of that city.

UPDATE:

In the mean­time I shot anoth­er role of film in the Con­tax 167 MT with a Carl Zeiss Dis­tagon 2.8/35mm lens attached.
When it came back from the lab, it was dissapointing.
The 36 frame film came back with 17 frames — all more or less heav­ily underexposed.
The lab has tried to res­cue as much as pos­sible dur­ing scan­ning and so there is massive grain visible.
This let’s me assume that in the ori­gin, it was not my fault with a loose lens, but it seems as if the cam­era has some deep­er issues — as also frames were skipped, which might be a hint that the elec­tro­mag­net­ic shut­ter release is no longer work­ing reliable.
So for the moment, the cam­era goes onto the shelf.

Let’s see what comes up from this story when finally post­ing the images made — both ana­log and digital.

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.