Kodak Ektachrome E100 on Holidays in 2025.

The purpose of this article is to lay to rest my nagging question as to whether there’s any point in me shooting slide film for holiday snaps in 2025. Spoiler alert – my answer is probably no.

I get on well with transparency film and shot it for fun and profit from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. The very first piece I wrote here was about shooting environmental portraits on transparency, and more than ten of my pieces have featured transparency films. But what place, if any, does slide film still have in its once central roll of boring your friends and relatives with holiday snaps?

Back in the day I mainly shot Fujifilm Provia/Sensia for publication and Kodachrome 64 on holidays, and after dropping film when digital came along I started up shooting colour neg again when my daughter got into it in about 2018. I was excited by the release of the new Ektachrome E100 (which Hamish wrote about here) but when I shot it myself I was nonplussed. Other people seemed to like it whereas I was asking myself, “What’s the point of this stuff?” It was really only today that the penny dropped that maybe this was because in 2019 I was looking at scans from the lab, whereas in the old days I only ever saw transparencies on a lightbox. A decent lab (in my opinion) will give you back scans where they keep as much shadow and highlight detail as they can, and let you pick the black and white points yourself. As a consequence the scans lack the lovely punchiness you see on a lightbox and look more like colour neg only not as good.

Okay. So how did I get from that view to a place where I decided to take an FM2 and a roll of E100 with me alongside my Leica D Lux 8 on a recent three week road trip?

Part of it was because I was not getting on with the D Lux. That’s a whole ‘nother story which I’ll deal with for a forthcoming piece, (“The Leica D Lux 8, or How I Found Love in an Arranged Marriage.”) but we’ll not dwell on that except to say that I had been making Lightroom Presets for the D Lux to take me back to the feel I had with the transparency films I shot in the 90s and I wanted to tweak these by shooting side-by-side with real slide film in real situations.

This sent me back to the archives, having a look at the Sensia I shot in the 90s – I found a similar shot and digitised with the exact same settings as the Ektachrome.

Anyway, shooting two cameras at once is tedious, and I only really did it for two or three days when we were in Sydney and were settled in our hotel and venturing out to sightsee. This gave me the chance to do the usual foodie things, the boats on the harbour and the galleries that I’d do on a regular holiday or that I might have done for a travel piece for a magazine back in the nineties.

When I got home, I didn’t really like the shop scans of the E100, and guess what, I thought, “What’s the point of this stuff?” But in the last couple of pieces I’ve done here I’ve been all misty-eyed after digitising Fujichrome Velvia and Polaroind SX70, so I figured I needed to do the digitisation myself and see if that would work the charm.

I made myself a little “dogmaholda” (a name I just invented) – a film holder that shows the edges of the film, and digitised it on my lightbox, using the look of the film on a lightbox as my reference rather worrying about whether there were bits of detail left in the shadows that could pull out of the magical Nikon Df Raw files. Instead I just went for verisimilitude, and it was lovely to be taken back to that  experience of looking at transparencies on a lightbox and thinking how cool they were.

Speaking of cool… Let’s talk about how blue they can get in the shadows.

Conclusions

I don’t want it to seem that this all became about whether E100 has a blue cast in the shadows, it’s just that when I digitised these I couldn’t unsee it and I had  to satisfy my curiosity.

I think if I’d only used the shop scans (as I did when I shot it back in 2019) I probably would not have even noticed, and just thought, as I did then, “What’s the point of this film?”

But let’s go back to the feature image. To me it looks pretty crazy. It does have a sort of nostalgic 60s vibe, like one of my old Jaques Cousteau books from the 1960s. Pictures don’t look like that anymore.

So I’m not sure about all this – what started out as me just thinking I’d shoot a roll of E100 turned in to a bit of a saga with no definite outcome. I guess I’ve established that a shop scan of E100 is very different from how it looks on a lightbox. And I guess I have confirmed my original premise that there’s not much point in using the film unless you’re going to try and match your scans to what the film actually looks like when you eyeball it.

I’ve established that for me anyway, it’s really easy to digitise the Fuji stocks I used to shoot and get nice results, which is of limited value since they don’t make them anymore. Anyway, I’ve got a whole wine carton full of 135 transparency out-takes of restaurants and winemakers from the 90s if I ever want them. I’ve probably got a few rolls of family stuff in there somewhere on Fuji and Kodachrome that will turn up in dribs and drabs and I will digitise them sometime.

I guess I’d know about Ektachrome already if I shot it back in the day but I didn’t really. I did shoot Ektachome 160T on the rare occasions I shot transparency under tungsten, but my editorial stuff back then was almost always in natural light.

As for Holiday Snaps,  back in the 90s, when I went to Europe (which is a long way from Australia and was a big deal) I remember thinking that a roll of Kodachrome a week was about right. I still think that, and when I was shooting this E100 I felt like I was burning it just for the sake of doing this piece. If I’d gone away with only one film camera for the trip, a nice compact would have been fine, or indeed the FM2 that I did take,  but I would not have shot transparency. Two rolls of Portra 160 would be ample. The E100 is very fine grained – grain does not really come in to the equation, so moving to digital does not greatly change that part of the aesthetic.

It’s a nice film – I got to like it once I’d actually handled it, played with it on a lighbox and digitised it myself. But that’s a lot of work and that blue cast has now become something I’d notice. Will I shoot it again? I don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I’m glad to have gone through these processes, because now I know things I didn’t before. It made me happy thinking that slide film is still a thing if I want to spend the money and put in the effort. Sensia/Provia is gone, but E100 still there if you really need it. And in practical terms this whole exercise has also given me a new camera, because I now like the D Lux 8 I was thinking of selling at a significant loss. (And I will write about that whole thing next.)

Make of this what you will. I’m not making any great pronouncements, merely sharing an experience and I’ll let you decide which, if any, of my experiences might be useful to you.

As always, thanks for reading!

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