Another positive film experience with Agfa ct precisa 100

A few weeks ago I tried shooting colour slide film for the first time in many years and was really impressed with the results. Well, last week we had a really bright sunny autumn day and I thought it would be great to try to capture some of the brilliant autumnal colours on slide film.

The film I used was Agfa CT Precisa 100 which I had loaded in my Minolta Dynax 5. I had taken the camera to CenterParcs when we visited in August and I’d only taken about 12 pictures, so I  took a walk around the bright orange and red trees in the local area, and shot them using aperture priority on the camera. The Dynax 5 sets the film speed from the DX coding on the film canister, and I didn’t alter that speed at all, letting the camera judge the correct exposure at the box speed of 100 ASA.

I received the film back from the processing lab a couple of days ago, and scanned these pictures at 3200 dpi on my Epson V550 perfection scanner. I left switched off all the scanner software options to ‘automatically correct’ exposure and colour balance etc, importing the TIFF files directly into Lightroom where all I needed to do was slightly pull back the highlight slider and apply a bit of sharpening.

As with the last colour slide film I took I’m impressed with the clarity, colour and definition of these pictures – there is still something about film that has a quality that it is very difficult to capture with a digital camera. Digital images would, without doubt, be better technically on every level – but they wouldn’t have the same ‘look’.