Derbyshire on Agfa CT-100 colour slide film
A couple of weeks ago we were on holiday in Derbyshire and naturally being a photographer I wanted to take some cameras with me. As well as digital pictures I also wanted to take some Agfa CT-100 colour slides, so I made my camera choices for the trip based on that requirement.
Agfa CT-100 Colour slide film images
Normally I would take along my Fuji X-T1 mirrorless camera, but because of the desire to take slide pictures as well, I decided on my Pentax K-5 dslr for digital images, and Pentax Z-1P slr for the slide images. With that combination I could share lenses between the digital and film cameras and therefore limit the amount of equipment I would need to take.
As for the film to load into the Z-1P the choice was fairly obvious – Agfa CT-100 (which is actually made by Fuji) is the cheapest and most easily available 35mm slide film at the moment, and I had a couple of rolls left from a holiday last year, so that was the film I loaded up.
When it came to lenses I took my Tamron 10-24mm super wide, a Sigma 18-125 HSM zoom, a Sigma 24-70mm zoom and a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens. The only one of these which wouldn’t fit both film and digital cameras is the Sigma HSM lens because, having an integral focus motor the Z-1P (quite reasonably) doesn’t understand how to focus it.
Unfortunately, the Sigma 24-70 has an issue that I wasn’t aware of until I got back from holiday and had a film developed after using it. When set to its widest setting of 24mm, the lens hood (which is a collapsible, rubber affair) causes vignetting. I could see through the viewfinder that it was causing a problem when extended so I pushed it back to the collapsed state, but I didn’t realise that even then, although it wasn’t visible in the viewfinder, it was still causing a problem.
That means that several of the pictures above show vignetting even though I’ve cropped the pictures by quite a lot to try to eliminate it. Fortunately it’s a simple problem to fix – just take the lens hood off, but it’s a shame it has affected quite a few pictures.
The really good thing to come out of taking these pictures is that it confirms for me that the Z-1P is a very capable camera when it comes to setting exposure. Slide film is well known for having very little exposure latitude – you need to get it right or the slide will be very dark and difficult to scan or too bright with washed out colour. I’m happy to say that all my pictures were very well exposed so the matrix metering in the Z-1P seemed to cope well in all the situations I threw at it.
The pictures above were scanned on an Epson V550 Perfection scanner as TIFF files and were imported into Lightroom where they had minimal tweaks before exporting as jpegs.
