Milestone: Kodak Ektachrome EPY 6118 64T
February 20th, 2008,Edit: They called me back, see below for the end of the story.
I just went several rounds with the folks at Precision Imaging, over the roll of Kodak Ektachrome 64T EPY that I finally sent in from my trip to France over the summer. While the conversation was frustrating, I noticed that the conversation required a fairly deep knowledge of things which I knew nothing about, four or five years ago.
It’s a tungsten-balanced E6 film, but yields a negative image (E6 is a slide-processing formula). Or at least, the 4×5 sheets of it that I shot two summers ago came back as negatives, and they were processed in E6. I’m fairly sure that the roll of 35mm I shot in France is the same stuff. I certainly hope it is, because the 64T EPY has the unusual characteristic of extended reciprocity range (meaning that you can take exposures up to 2 minutes long without unnatural color shift or the additional exposure math required by all other types of film) and I was shooting that stuff in the dark of night in ancient alleyways.
The problem is that I asked them to give me a contact sheet. First, Cindy called me to tell me that they can’t do contact sheets of slide film. I agreed that I didn’t want contact sheets of positive film, but this film will, I believe, yield negative film. Just process it E6, I told them. If you get negatives, cut me a contact sheet. If they’re positives, just send them back.
Ten minutes later, I get a call back from James, who wanted to explain to me that a contact sheet would require scanning the positives, and that would cost around $60. I spend about 20 minutes again explaining that this film should be processed E6, and I was pretty sure it was going to come out as negatives. I even pulled out the old 4×5s to double check. The conversation got a little heated, and he passed me up to Peter (who I’ve worked with before on some fairly large orders).
At this point, I was pretty confused. I thought James was telling me that no E6-processed film could be contact-printed, short of using cibachrome, which is no longer produced anywhere in the world. This confused me because printing contact sheets is the same process, essentially, as scanning negatives. I know I had scanned those 4×5s, which I was now holding in my hand, and if you can’t make contact sheets off a negative, then you can’t do anything with them at all. But I’m not a printer, and I dislike color chemistry, so it’s possible there was something I didn’t know about.
Peter suggested that maybe they had been cross-processed. I paused at this, because I had been surprised when the 4×5s came back as negatives. Could they check their records to see if they had cross-processed the 4×5s? No, they need not bother, because cross-processing yields a very grainy negative with unpredictable color shifts. The prints I had made were smooth as silk, and Peter LeGrand even called one a “masterful printing job,” which he would never have said about a grainy print (Peter likes to shoot with 16×20 sheets of film, using a camera bigger than my sofa). And while I had needed to do some color correction to remove the harsh yellow colors of sodium-arc lighting from the street lamps, the tungsten-balance of the film had required less color correction, not more: they could not have been cross-processed.
We started from scratch: I’d delivered two rolls of E6 120 film (120 is a type of medium format film, which is used in a variety of cameras to yield images in 6×6, 6×4.5, 6×9 and even 6×12 format, depending on the camera) and one roll of 35mm E6. Did I want all three to be cross-processed and contact-printed? No, the two rolls of 120 were to be processed “normally,” meaning the instructions on the film. These, I assured Peter, would yield color positives, and so contact prints were not desired, needed, or even presumed possible. For that matter, I added, the 35mm was to be processed normally as well.
Peter wondered why, if I knew that, would I ask for contact sheets from the 35mm? I reiterated my experience: two summers ago, on a deadline, I had Precision process a dozen sheets of 4×5 of this film type, and had been very surprised when they gave me negatives, not positives. Was I sure they were negatives? Yes, I was holding them in my hand and they were definitely negatives. Had Precision made contact sheets of them? No, I had assumed they would be slides, since they were processed E6, and so had not ordered contact sheets (a 4-inch by 5-inch slide is a fairly large finished image, and I had planned to display them as they were). Was I sure that this was the same film? We compared information on the 35mm case, the film in my hand, the box of unexposed 4×5s. There were a few discrepancies, but Peter assured me these were the difference between 35mm and 4×5 markings.
Peter was flummoxed. He had never seen a film which required the E6 process but yielded a color negative. I allowed that the discovery had been shocking to me as well, but lacking his experience and knowledge, could not say how uncommon this was (as I mentioned, I’ve worked with Peter many times before, and have never asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to). Peter demurred, he would not call himself an expert in any field, and thought it was possible that there were things he hadn’t seen before.
While this was all very interesting, I suggested that the problem was much simpler than the tangled thread of our conversation led us to believe. What I needed, I explained, was to be able to preview the images before choosing which ones to work on further. Why not process the film and then decide what to do? If they came out as positive transparencies, then they could just send them back to me as is, and I could preview them. If they came out as negatives, then cut the film and print me a contact sheet so I could see what I had to work with. Rather than debating what would or would not happen, when I was not completely certain it was even the same film type (although Peter was), let’s just work with what we get to give me the result I need.
Peter, though, was not completely satisfied. He wanted to know why I would use such a film, why anyone would make it. I explained about the film’s extended reciprocity range, and he agreed that he’d never heard of a film with that characteristic. I did not mention that he clearly had, since his company had processed the original film. He wanted to be certain that the films were the same. He carefully noted all the information I had from the two boxes (the box of 4×5s and the roll of unexposed 35mm which I thought was the same as the roll I’d given Precision), and again reiterated that the 35mm in his hand was the same type as in my hand. He would process the film, and check Kodak’s technical specs, and call me back in a few hours.
We’ll see how it goes. I’ve checked several websites and confirmed that the only Kodak 64T on the market is the EPY, and that my assumptions about its performance characteristics are correct. I’ll complete this post when I know how it turns out, and possibly even write several reviews mentioning the E6/negative concern for the benefit of other photographers who might be interested in using it.
A few hours later, Peter calls me back to inform me that the film came out and it was definitely slide film. That was part of the mystery solved. I looked up my information on the original 4×5s and had them look up the original order. It turns out that those images had been processed C41, meaning they’d been cross-processed! Now I’m the one who is completely confused, because I can’t imagine why I would have asked for that series to be done like that, especially since I’ve never seen what the film normally looks like.
Now I have a completely different dilemma, since Rik Brandt has offered to let me borrow his 4×5 camera, expressly to cut off all my excuses for not continuing that project. Do I process the new film in E6 or C41? Will processing the new film the way it was intended to be processed yield results that won’t be in keeping with the original set? I suppose the only way to find out is to try a few sheets processed as “normal,” and view the results. Of course, I’ll have to get them developed by the guys at Precision, whom I’ve just given so much grief to.