I finally got around to scanning some more color film that I picked up from the lab a number of weeks ago. This particular image was made with some slightly expired Kodak Portra 400 film and exposed with my trusty ol’ Mamiya C330 TLR.
I was using a wider angle 65mm lens with this image. My copy of the lens is the older “chrome” version which tends to not have very good lens coating to limit flair. The new black Mamiya lenses tend to be much better in this regard. Sometimes that isn’t such a terrible thing when I can use the flaws of a lens to my advantage. There was a ton of sun during this particular shoot and I figured I might as well run with it.
The final image has a bit more grain than I typically like with color film but I can easily attribute this to the fact that the film was a bit expired. About five years to be exact and I have no idea how it was stored before it came to my hands. Ultimately I can’t really complain. I’ve been watching a lot of lower budget 16mm motion pictures from the 1970’s and those are always pretty grainy too. There is a certain beauty to the grain structure of C-41 film.