I’ve been in a pretty committed ménage à trois with Ilford HP5 and Kodak Portra 400 for the last few years. There have been dalliances with others but these were only one or two roll stands, that was until a week or so ago.
This summer Kodak Alaris announced that after a pilot programme in the UK Kodak Pro Image 100 would be available in Europe and the North America*. It’s been available overseas for over twenty years, so it is not a new film, even if it is new to me.
Having traded something for my first roll I figured that I should try and establish a baseline for its performance. Eschewing my usual testing technique of just bashing away and seeing what happens I put this roll in my Canon EOS 3. It has a solid metering system which means I can get properly metered shots without sacrificing spontaneity.
The results are lovely, the colour and contrast, the skin tones and the grain have a reality to them, real and yet still film. I’m hooked. In photography nice things are often costly and sometimes they are expensive. It’s nice to find that Pro Image 100 is not a costly film.
Most of these were taken with my 50mm f/1.8 which lives on the EOS 3. It, like Pro Image 100, is a not a costly option, and it continues to impress me. There are also a few taken with an EF 35mm f/1.4L MKII, which is astoundingly good but also not nearly as ‘cost-effective’.
It’s perfect timing of course, trust me to fall in love with an ISO 100 film just before the clocks go back. Over the next few rolls I hope to get a feel for it, and to start using it in my meter-less cameras. The ménage à trois has, for the moment, given way to polyamory.
*I cribbed a bunch of facts for this post from a dpreview article that you can read in its entirety here.