Every year in London on the 29th June the streets are filled with a giant party atmosphere celebrating gay right movements and various sexualities coming together to express themselves in one of the city’s more colourful events. Pride.
This is the first time i have been to pride since 2011 as i had got bored of it, for years London pride had been neglected and was usually pouring with rain for at least a few hours, however this year it seems to have been given a complete overhaul, whether people dug deeper in their pockets or maybe it was just organised better but this years pride was, fantastic! One of the best ones i have been to in years.
It was great to see the streets filled with people enjoying themselves, the weather was perfect, not a cloud in the sky. Music was playing on every street corner from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Circus. The city was alive.
I was already a few frames in to the Ektar 100 loaded in my camera, the previous day’s weather had been terrible and i only managed to get a few frames off around Covent Garden. I was determined to get some shots over pride, i wanted to use this colour film to my full advantage. I brought 3 spare rolls of film with me and went on my merry way into central to meet some friends at one of my favourite bar’s in Soho, Ku Bar.
For this event i wanted my equipment to be as light as possible, i opted for my Sigma 50mm f/1.4 prime for the shallow aperture and it being much lighter than my 24-70. I stuck around f/2 – f/5.6 rarely going any higher.
Annoyingly retouching has taken longer with this film, there were considerable dust and scratches and also water stains on the film which i am not impressed about, the film processing seems to have not been very thorough this time and has left me with a few frames that required more work on them which could of been avoided.
The colours of this film are so saturated and fairly contrasty, Ektar was once likened by my tutor at University for sharing similar properties to Kodachrome however i feel Kodachrome had a warmer more contrasty feel to the final photographs which Ektar misses.
The grain is very desirable and fine not impeding on the quality of the photograph, i would like to see the results of Ektar pulled to 64 and then adding some contrast in photoshop how much it may resemble Kodachrome. Although as i previously stated it is not going to be identical. Dare i say it but i prefer the result of Ektar 100 over Portra 800, even though Portra is a gorgeous film type it lacks the punchiness and saturation of Ektar.
The 35mm Project 