National Earmuff Day is celebrated each year on March 13! Technically, earmuffs are categorized as clothing accessories or personal protection equipment, specially designed to cup and protect the ears from either cold weather or noise.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? –Albert Einstein
Kodak’s UltraMax 400 is a relatively high-speed daylight-balanced color negative film that offers wide exposure latitude as well as a relatively fine grain structure producing what Kodak claims to be “consistent and accurate colors.” With all the brouhaha about the cost of film these day, here’s what it costs: B&H is selling a three pack of 36-expsure rolls of this film for $26.60 or $8.83 per roll. By comparison, a three-pack of the film is $34.51 or $11.50 a roll from Amazon.
It’s A Really Special Film
This consumer-oriented film has a vibrant color palette that’s aimed at general and outdoor photography. Like most Kodak consumer films, it has warm tones but it’s not quite as warm as Kodak Gold 200 so that should make it good film choice portraits. The film’s strong saturation works well for landscapes too. It’s slightly grainier than Kodak Gold 200 but not objectionably so and it’s versatile enough to keep in your camera bag, particularly when you want that “film look.” Because of its speed and tonality, UltraMax 400 seems to be a good choice for both daylight and low light shooting.
During my recent solo photo walk down Mainstreet (yes, it’s one word) in Parker, Colorado, I shot a 36-exposure roll of fresh Kodak Ultramax 400. The film is supposed to perform best at “box speed” or slightly overexposed and that’s how I shot it during my photo walk with it loaded into a Leica M6 TTL. The film is DX coded and has some a tolerance for exposure and can be pushed to 1600 if you need an extra speed bump. The M6 TTL I shot the film in has no DX Coding support. Heck, the mostly-manual camera doesn’t even have an on-off switch.
How I Made this photograph: The below image was made with my Leica M6 TTL with 50mm Summicron-S f/2 lens, exposure unrecorded but I was shooting a lot around the sweet spot aperture of f/8 that day. I did shoot a quick brick wall test and both film and Summicron-S lens performed up to the standards you might expect from Leica and Kodak. The film is said to be optimized for skin tone reproduction making it suitable for portraiture but I did not get to photograph any people during my photowalk, not that I don’t want to. Some kids did run into my Jacks and Ball shots and they either made or ruined the shot–I like it.
The film has a nominal sensitivity of ISO 400 that the company says is well suited for scanning or making enlargements. I sent the film to The Darkroom for processing and scanning and the film and CD was shipped back to me within eight days. All of the 2048 x 3072 “Enhanced” scans were clean and bright and showed off the film’s dynamic range, color and sharpness,
I really liked Ultramax 400’s rendition of bright colors and it will be my go-to color film when the light might be a little lower than the conditions under which I shot these tests. I just bought a three-pack and hope to shoot it at an upcoming Cars & Coffee event. Hopefully a post about that experience will be upcoming on a Wheels Wednesday post real soon now.
If you would like to send me a roll of film to review or any other stuff that could be used for these posts and my videos you \can Contact me and I’ll reply with a mailing address.