My name is Andrew and I am a fine art destination wedding photographer in Italy (Lake Como, Amalfi). I am also in love with portrait and people photography so from time to time I shoot people on film. This article is going to be about 35mm film - Kodak Ultramax 400 overexposed by 1 stop.
I have already had some experience with Kodak Ultramax in the past which you can read about here. This time I bought Kodak Ultramax 400 and shot the entire roll at ISO 200. So basically I overexposed the film by one stop. I was very surprised with the results though. Quite a lot of images turned out to be very nice on skin tones and pretty easy on grain. I actually liked the color pallet of this overexposed film and I did not notice that annoying yellow tint that I had with Kodak Gold 200 in the past. I also shot 2 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 without overexposure so you will be able to compare both films here too. It is quite cheap film on the market and I would not say it is any worse than let's say Lomography 400 which is quite expensive nowadays.
On the bottom of the page I will share with you my personal opinion about Kodak Ultramax 400 and will show you some samples of the Gold 200 for comparison. And one more thing - you can always tell me "THANK YOU" by donating 2-3 euro/dollars, this would encourage me to write more articles as I have a huge library of various film scans and all what it needs now - a bit of my time. When I get no respond from my readers- I feel that no one is interested in film photography anymore. If you think my attempts to share samples of film scans are worth a little tip - please donate. And now enjoy the shots:
Kodak Ultramax 400 35mm
Shop: online store
Price: €6 + €2 shipping
Camera: Canon 300v
Lens: Canon EF 50mm F/1.8 II
Location: outside
Dev + Scan: €5.00 Photolab.lt (Lithuania)
Total test price: €13 or €0.36 per frame.
Challenges & Personal opinion:
One of the challenges was overexposing cheap film = uncertainty. But in general I never doubted Kodak film in such situations. It may be bad when underexposed but overexposing is pretty much stable in all Kodak film. Kodak Ultramax felt pretty comfortable when overexposed too. I was taking a lot of images at sunny locations so I decided to lower ISO in camera to 200 and allow myself a bit more in F stop to blur the background as much as I can. I cannot see any serious challenges with this film - it is stable, reliable and pleasant in color.
If you would be interested to compare overexposed Ultramax 400 with Gold 200 - here you go:
Kodak Gold 200
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