I’m sometimes a sucker for sale flyers from camera stores, especially when it comes to Lomography’s rather regular new film announcements. I was able to resist for several months, but Lomo sent me a $10 off coupon that was about to expire—I’m a sucker for that stuff too, apparently—and so I jumped on some Kono Kilorit 400 (now, sadly out of stock at Lomography).
I took a roll along with me on the Chicago Road Trip and loaded it into the FG on the way to Memphis, so you’ve already seen a few pictures from the roll. I should go back and re-process them, though, as I had the white balance pretty far off. The second half of the roll was shot after work and on a brief walk with my darling, adorable wife one Saturday, and (once I got the white balance a bit closer) it performed admirably.
About the white balance thing… In fetching the links above, I noticed that the color (and sharpness) in the example pictures from Lomography and Kono are much different than what I achieved with my at-home developing and processing, so I went back and re-processed these. I got closer with the white balance, but the shots on their sites are much cleaner and sharper. It’s distinctly possible that I had the developer a bit too hot or developed too long, and I did no noise reduction, but I’m still feeling a bit of paranoia.
Here’s a shot with the original white balance. I remember struggling mightily to even get to this.
Not bad… the morning sun turned the frame a nice gold, but it’s really a bit green.
After a good bit of playing around, I got to this:
It’s missing the gold from the sun and it might be a bit magenta, but it’s better, and it shows me just how difficult (and important) white balance is. I wonder if I should start rolls by shooting a color chart or something. Many rolls have the frame numbers printed in white, and it’s fairly easy to pull white balance from those. But with films like this Kono—movie film that’s had the rem-jet removed and been hand-rolled for shooting in 35mm cameras—there are no frame numbers (and Fuji film (more on that below) prints all the film information in yellow anyway), and so some neutral grey target somewhere on the roll would be helpful.
InshaAllah I’ll remember that the next time I go to shoot the Kono film, and the Lomography Cine 200 that I still have a couple of rolls of, and any Fuji stock I have in the film drawer, and maybe everything just for grins, at least once, or maybe I should just leave it to chance? Burn a frame shooting a target, or spend time endlessly nudging the temperature and tint sliders to get something that’s not quite right.
Allahu Alim.
Anyway.
The neighborhood across the street is coming up quickly. The frame above now has walls and a roof, plus doors and windows.
The sun was fairly low and cast some lovely light on the neighborhood. If I could get a spot-on white balance, I’d be a bit more obvious, but these are close.
So I mentioned something about the Kono Kilorit 400 being a Fuji stock…
According to Fujifilm’s Motion Picture Film Manual, FN 92 points to Fuji Reala 500D. Sadly, the Scan-O-Matic slide holder obscured the explicit film name, but with FN 92, I was able to decipher some little marks…
Sure looks like FUJI 500D to me…
Anyway. I took a couple of free lensing shots of some ornamental grasses and they turned out quite nice, almost like album covers for some experimental or pop musics…
So the Kono Kilobit 400… I like it more, once I got the white balance a bit closer. Sadly, it’s sold out now, but I probably couldn’t recommend it: it’s $36 plus shipping for three rolls of 24 exposures each. That’s about $0.45 per shot. Quite expensive, really. I can get a 5 pack of Porta 400 for a tiny bit more than $36. But Porta is still being manufactured: the Kono Kilobit 400 is sold out, and only Allah knows if it will ever show up again.
To wrap this up, I can’t quite decide which of these I like better, but I’m a sucker for the twisted colors and strange things that happen at the beginning and end of film rolls…
