5 Frames with Yashica Electro 35 GS & Kodak Gold 200 – By Salman Rameli

I have finished this roll of Kodak Gold 200 in January this year, although I hadn’t sent it to my local development lab as I was too lazy to drive there. Besides, I also had a roll of Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 that was half full loaded in my camera, and I thought I’ll finish that roll and then take both of them to be developed. I stored the Gold 200 in my drawer until mid April.

The results are mostly pictures of random scenes without any particular themes, as I snapped anything that interested me. There are only 2 notable occasions that were documented in this roll; me going out with my friends, and celebrating my father’s birthday. The photos of going out with friends are less than 5, while my father’s birthday has more than 5, so here it is.

Oh, and I also shot this roll at EI 80, overexposing a little over 1 stop.

It was way back in December 2019. My father just had his 65th birthday (retirement age in Indonesia) and we decided to eat out to celebrate the occasion. I brought my trusty Yashica Electro 35 GS loaded with Kodak Gold 200. We dined at a restaurant called “Botanika” that served mainly Indonesian cuisines, which I was recommended by my coworker. Plus, it located just around 4kms from where I live. I invited my girlfriend to join us, and on the way to the restaurant we stopped by my grandparents’ house to pick my grandmother and my cousin up. All 7 of us sit comfortably in my father’s Ford Everest.

This was my first time using Kodak Gold 200. I knew that it has yellowish tone that reminded people of the old pictures, so I was keen to see the results. It might looked like pictures in my grandparents’ photo-books, although my late grandfather was more of a Fujifilm person rather than Kodak.

The restaurant has high ceiling that gives airy feeling, with exposed bricks for the wall, wood tables and chairs, and plenty of plants (some natural, some artificial) that made us feel like we were eating in a tropical garden. However, the color palette inside, combined with Gold’s tone, produced incredibly warm brownish-reddish color that is too strong for my taste, so I tone it down slightly in Lightroom, as I still wanted some “imperfections” shall we say, in images taken using film.

Other than tone shift that a touch too much which can be easily corrected, I am sold on this film. In fact, I loaded another Kodak Gold 200 in my Yashica for a project that I currently working on.

You can find my Instagram account here, and you can view my portfolio of my programming projects here.

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