Louise and Donny at Pioneer Day Fair. Miami, 1969.
This post is mostly about films I've used and places I've been, so if that doesn't interest you, it's okay to tune out now.
Color Transparency Film
I settled on Fujichrome 100D as my transparency (slide) film of choice in 1986-87 and used it until moving to digital in 2003. When I was traveling internationally on photojournalism assignments in the late 1980s and early '90s, I would often board a plane with a carry-on bag containing five or six 100-foot rolls of Fujichrome 100 film in canisters, a daylight loader, a changing bag, and a bunch of empty, reloadable cassettes. I occupied myself on those long trips by loading the bulk film into 36-exposure cassettes, so that I would arrive fully ready to shoot. (Each 100-foot bulk roll gave me nineteen 36-exposure rolls.)
I used Fujichrome for Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, traveling 35,000 miles in fifteen states in the mid-90s. The book was published in 1996 and won numerous awards. It was the most significant accomplishment of my career.
Color Negative (print) Film
My main use for color negative film was weddings. Until the mid-90s, I photographed two or three weddings most years, whenever someone would ask me, but I didn't market for weddings. I mostly used whatever film Kodak was selling at the time.
That all changed around 1996-97, as I noticed that my commercial business was declining somewhat and began to explore other possibilities.
Until then, I had been using medium format cameras for weddings because the quality of the available 35mm films wasn't all that great. However, Fuji introduced two game-changing new 35mm films: Reala (100-speed) and NPH (400-speed). The quality was comparable to medium format films of just a few years ago. 16x20 prints from 35mm Reala easily matched my best Hasselblad prints from 1990.
In a comparison test of 22X enlargements from Reala, NPH 400, Fuji NPS 160 and another 160 speed portrait film, viewers consistently picked NPH as second only to Reala in sharpness. In a 20 x 30 print it has slightly more grain than the 160-speed films, but it's noticeably sharper. I standardized on Fuji NPH for wedding photography and used it until digital changed the world.
Next time: Black and white films
The above photo was made on 35mm Kodachrome-X, the predecessor of Kodachrome 64. The camera was a Nikon F (original), my first really good camera, and a Tamron 135mm f2.8 lens.
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Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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