Shooting in winter time can sometimes be very uninspiring and difficult. There are no vibrant colours in the nature, and the weather is sometimes really and truly nasty. Therefore, I have made myself a project this winter. To capture the mood of the Norwegian winter with analog photography. I have not limited myself in terms of films, developers or styles. The goal with the project is to convey the Norwegian winter mood through my photography.
This is the second entry in the project, and in this one, I am working with one of the days where the weather is nice and where there are colours to work with.
To capture the colours, I chose to go with a very under-rated film that I find to work very well with the Norwegian winter tones. The Kodak Pro Image 100. I have used some rolls of this film previously, ordered on eBay as it was not sold in Europe. From what I have gathered online, this film was originally introduced in South America and Asia as an entry-level professional colour negative film. Based on the Kodak Gold, it was then altered, tweaked and improved to produce better skin tones, but keep the warm Kodak colour palette that the Kodak Gold is renown for.
When you google this film, you get a lot of «so-called experts in the field» who has written some kind of a review of this film based on their experience after shooting one roll of film. All of these conclude with something like «This film is so cheap, why would Kodak brand such a cheap film professional, Ektar is far better». I find this to be unfair to the Pro Image. KODAK Ektar is a brilliant film, and a film I use a lot myself, but I find it to be too vibrant for my winter shooting. I also mean, that you can never judge a film just by shooting one roll of it, and choice of film is a personal choice and relies heavily on personal preference. after fifteen rolls (three five-packs) of Pro-Image, I have found this film to work brilliantly for my preferences.
One of the lovely things about working in Norway in the winter, is that morning light happens at more comfortable times than in the summer. My «early morning shoot» started at 09.30 with a cup of coffee and ended around 11.00 with me rewinding the film back into the cassette and traveled home for development. Even so, I did not meet as many people as I expected on my little outing into the lovely lights and colours. And I find that I was able to capture the mood of this morning.
A sunny, cold winters day after many grey dull days, with some lovely almost purple colours in the skies and a yellowish tone on the ground near the lake.
I then ended my day with doing a C41 process. I had fresh chemicals which were mixed right before, and the cycle went like a dream. I see a slight cyan-cast in the scans. This could be because I had to pause the development between the Developer and the Blix due to a temperature fall in the Blix. I then left the films in the tank with some 38 degrees clean water for some minutes, while the Blix heated up again.