Last Updated on 01/11/2017 by Chris Gampat
While Kodak Portra, Fujifilm Velvia, and some of the others tend to steal the spotlight, there are a number of pretty good yet affordable color films on the market. George from Negative Feedback decided to put a number of them to the test in a video released earlier last year. All the images were taken on the Leica M7, MP, and M3, using a 50mm and 35mm summicron f2 with Kodak Colorplus 200, Agfa Vista 200, and Fuji Superia 400. The images were taken portrait style in a studio and using natural light.
While Kodak and Fujifilm tend to still be the best marketed, Agfa makes some incredible film overall that’s pretty affordable and capable of delivering images with some really interesting colors. In fact, sometimes the most important parameters to keep in mind when working with film is typically your lighting. Film like this is balanced to daylight and you need to consider the color of the light that is being reflected off of surfaces.
Sure you can apply some fixer in the darkroom, but even so the scans you’ll get can sometimes fall apart depending on how you scan them. The best original photos also still come from the negatives themselves.