That’s the whole post: techniques for dealing with slide film with different light meter types. What follows is why that method works and when it doesn’t.

I hope it helps you understanding light metering better so you can architect your shots just like the artists architected the sculptures in Storm King Arts Center.

Quick thing first, as this might save you some reading: if your camera is a point-and-shoot with no exposure controls, it’s already metering and setting exposure for you the way it was designed to, and probably it does that job well enough most of the time. Go shoot, and enjoy it, and save this post for the moment you start wanting to have more control over your exposure with a manual camera.

Let me start with a fact: film doesn’t give you an instant preview, and why that might be a point of frustration…

Film doesn’t show you anything until it might be too late

With no LCD preview, histogram or capture assistants, every frame is a decision you have to make before you press the shutter button, and you find out whether it worked days later, potentially after spending money for a Lab to develop, we don’t want that to happen, and that’s why metering matters more on film than on digital, hence relying on an external light meter. On digital you can be wrong and fix it. On film, you can be wrong (thinking you’re right), and have a bad surprise after developing.

That’s a problem that might get worse when you shoot slides, because if you can go to places again and redo the shot, the loss is time and money, but if you are taking film shots with bad light metering at a trip, that might be more unforgiving (as probably you might get in a plane again!).

We don’t want that to happen, and we are here to help you prevent it.

Let’s dive deeper into light meters.

The reflective meter is configured against grey targets

There are two types of light meters: reflected ones, and incident ones. This article I wrote dives deeper into that difference: The difference between incident and reflective light meters.

Here are more details about both light meter types: a reflected meter (which is likely the kind built into your camera), measures light bouncing off objects. It has no idea what it’s looking at, and it is factory-calibrated with a 18% grey card in mind, meaning the it averages out to middle grey, around 18% reflectance, and it hands you the exposure that would make whatever it sees land on that value.

Here’s a practical example: if you point it at a white wall (or a white towel, a target you know it’s fully white), it tells you to adjust exposure until the object renders 18% grey. This is easier to see if you eliminate colors and shoot b&w: the white target will literally look grey.

Point it at a dark mousepad, or a dark steel sculpture, and the opposite happens, and the steel goes grey too (at the cost of blowing highlights to a clipping state). That’s because the meter will tell you to either increase the ISO, lower the aperture, or reduce the shutter speed to capture enough of the dark target.

That’s because white targets reflect more light, while dark ones do the opposite. The reflective light meters are configured in the factory to measure against something, so they tell you to adjust exposure to match against 18% grey targets.

This is easier to imagine when you convert scenes to black and white, and I invite you to get your digital camera and do some tests and see for yourself. Set the camera to grayscale JPGs and target a white wall with a spot light meter from your camera: you will see that the white wall will look 18% grey.

Test it out and let us know in the comments about your findings!

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A textured white wall actually sits about two stops brighter than middle grey. That’s where it belongs in the picture. Deep shadow sits a couple of stops the other way, and that’s where it belongs. A reflected meter flattens both toward the middle unless you know how far to push back, and knowing how far to push back is a skill you have to train your eyeballs and build experience over time.

There are techniques to measure multiple points in the same exposure, like highlights, shadows, middle points, and calculate averages. If you want to dive deeper into this, check out the zone system, co-created by no one else than Ansel Adams and Fred Archer ,two of the biggest names in landscape photography in History!

But back to our scenario, the thing is that sometimes, an incident light meter might be just simpler to use, because…

It allows you to measure the light, not the objects!

Incident meters are these ones with a white dome on it, rather than using from the camera viewport, you stand where your subject is, point the dome back toward the camera, and it reads the light falling on the scene, not the light reflecting from objects in that scene. It doesn’t care whether your subject is white, black, or weathered steel, and that’s where the name comes from.

What comes back is the exposure for the light itself. Incident meters will make the white wall land two stops up, where it belongs, while making the shadow land down where it also belongs. Shadows stay shadows, highlights stay highlights, and the relationships between tones in the scene survive onto the film.

That’s key for correct exposures, especially if you are shooting slide film, which is less forgiving with exposure mistakes. I love using incident light meter for landscapes because…

It removes a decision, reducing stress

While spot metering is powerful, and it’s what most people recommend for careful work, especially if you have a spot meter capable of measuring with a precision of 1 degree (in other words: really really a spot), it arrives with a question attached: “Where do I point it?”

Meter the highlight, meter the shadow, split the difference, place it on a zone. As I wrote before, that’s a real skill, it takes practice, and it’s one more thing to get wrong while the light is moving.

An incident meter removes the question. There’s nowhere to aim. You put it in the light and press the button, and as long as you are sharing the same light condition, you are fine (and this is important - “share the same light condition”).

Note that I’m not arguing spot metering is worse! For scenes where you can’t reach your subject it’s the only honest option, and it deserves its own post, with Ansel Adams and the zone system and all of it.

For what I was doing at Storm King, multiple spot measurements would have gotten me to roughly the same numbers, but with more steps, more measurements, under 100F on a Summer day.

Why this works for landscapes

The catch is simple. Incident metering only works when the light falling on you is the same light falling on your subject.

At Storm King (and most outdoor shoots, like photowalks) that was true. I was standing in the same open sun as the sculptures, a few steps away from most of them. Same sky, same Sun (hopefully, lol), same everything.

Something I like about the incident metering on sunny days is the fact that I can “set and forget”...

But there is a caveat: if I stay under a tree, while the thing I’m photographing sits in full sun, the incident meter tricks me. Same problem if a cloud passes over me and not over the subject. When I can’t share the light, this method doesn’t apply, and there’s no other solution than reverting to spot metering or walking towards the object to measure incoming light in there.

The “set and forget” and its caveat will also improve the attention I pay to the sky, and consequentially, to the light around myself.

You take a reading, set the camera, and that setting holds, but only until the light condition changes. So, instead of metering every frame, you start watching for the thing that would invalidate your reading. A cloud rolls in. You step into shade. The sun drops behind the hill. Then you meter again. The EV values will differ. You start noticing where the sun sits relative to your subject, which is something you should be noticing anyway, I believe this will make you more familiar with the light, hence making you a better photographer.

In an ideal world you’d meter every shot. In practice, if the sun is high and nothing around you has changed, the reading from three frames ago is still good.

If you don’t have a meter at all

Sunny 16 and cellphone spot light meters are my default fallback, and it’s worth mentioning.

Bright sun, no clouds. Set your aperture to f/16 and your shutter speed to the reciprocal of your film speed. ISO 100 film means 1/100, or whatever your camera has closest to it. From there you open up as the light drops. Light overcast, f/11. Overcast, f/8. Heavy overcast, f/5.6. Open shade, f/4.

It’s rough, and it’ll get you within a stop, which is fine on negative film, but risky on slides. Think of it as what you use when the battery dies.

That’s why I wanted to shoot slides to illustrate this post ;)

How it came out

Box speed, ISO 50, no adjustment. The exposures landed where I wanted them. A few shadows went deep, which is what Velvia does under hard sun, and I’m fine with that. Deep shadow reading as deep shadow is the correct answer. The colors held, the highlights on the lighter pieces didn’t blow out, and I didn’t lose a frame.

I am happy that nothing went wrong and every single frame on my expensive and unexpired Velvia 50 got nicely performed. Proudly developed and scanned by Gelatin Labs, making every penny invested on that film stock worth it!

So, do you need an incident light meter?

If your camera meters for you and you like your photos, no. Genuinely, no.

If you’re shooting a fully manual body, or slide film, or you keep getting scans back where the exposures wander around for reasons you can’t identify, an incident meter is the smallest change that fixes the most. They start cheap. You’ll use it for years across every camera you own, and when it eventually dies you replace the meter instead of paying to have a camera serviced.

If you are starting with film photography, I recommend starting there. The zone system can wait.

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Happy metering, good light and good luck, and thank you for reading so far!

But I also observed something interesting regarding the Mexico culture, this one, related to hand painted subjects on walls, businesses, or anything that would be lit by an LED screen (or neon sign) elsewhere on Earth.

This touched me a lot, and I started collecting photos of it for a zine.

Buy ¿Pincel o Print? Zine

Let me introduce you to ¿ Pincel o Print ?

Preface

Limited edition of 30

If you like it, and/or would like to support this initiative, you can get yours! I printed, received them all, inspected, and numbered each one. This is not print on demand with a cheap and dirty printing service. I value a lot for quality over quantity here at Camera Clara, so I wanted to receive all zines to inspect the printing quality before having it reaching your hands, and I can say, the print quality on those is beautiful!

Send me a DM if you want it signed, if I know you personally, I will handwrite something that will touch your heart!

Buy yours!

What are people talking about it?

Substack community is the best! 🙌

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Over time, I wrote articles here on this platform addressing these topics in regular writings rather than rants. If I remember a post I did about a specific topic, I’ll add a link to it.

I appreciate when people expose themselves and are truthful like that, so I think you will appreciate knowing me a little bit more as well. Let me enumerate my top 10 list of displeasing acts and annoying photography topics I have observed over the last decade.

10. The film vs. Digital conversation

I put this at number 10 on the list because, fortunately, it's a conversation that is fading away and getting better. Film photographers are awesome and humble enough to disengage with this bait. As polarized as the world is nowadays, all mediocre people need are two things to compare and elect a winner. This topic isn’t different. When someone comes to me asking which one is better, I tell them I need to <insert excuse> and get away from that person. I even recorded a podcast the other day to talk about this.

9. A certain company’s toxicity

I don't need to say the name for you to recognize this company. I can just say they were the leaders in photography in the 90s and then abandoned their customers to sell motion pictures to Hollywood because money talks, babe. Now that film is re-emerging, these opportunists come with product renaming and pretend they give a fuck about community, while they're selling the same product with different packaging. They make customers believe that resolving some cross-company politics is for customers' benefit. The fact this company isn't giant is because they are politicians, not lovers of the business they operate.

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8. People who think photography = gear

Once in NY, I met a person who is proud to say they are “Team Alpha,” referring to a specific camera model from a specific brand. I was so sorry to hear that, especially because this person posts bad photos in their portfolio and literally uses equipment the wrong way, like a speedlite strobe pointing to the sky (will that reflect on Mars?). This person is always advocating for the brand rather than the art, has read zero photography books, and is ignorant. I don’t think this is the way, unless you want to work as a salesperson for that brand (and even then, some brands like Leica require you to be culturally invested).

This behavior makes me sad, and there’s nothing I can do to help that person out without having it get far from me.

It’s not a big deal though, just a rant of mine. Let people be happy with whatever they want, Raf ¯_(ツ)_/¯!

7. 100K+ YouTubers who think they’re God

This one happened during an event in NYC. I wasn’t there, but it was so obvious and ugly that a friend of mine came to comment about it with me. The story goes like this: there was a photography event in the city, one of these that lasts the whole day, with panels, YouTubers talking stuff, brands showcasing their nice products, etc. It was a nice event, well organized.

After the conference day, everyone at the event headed to a bar for the night, making the bar fully crowded with most people from the event. This part is important to say because I strongly believe the folks I’m going to criticize would not behave like that if they were at a regular bar with people who don’t know them.

The “famous” YouTubers were cutting the line to get their beer, while the rest of the people waited in line for tens of minutes.

Everybody saw that, Mr... (I won’t say the name, of course).

Note that there are some incredible YouTubers out there, including Nick Lopresti, Max Adams, the Petapixel guys (these are super humble and approachable), David Imel (<3), and many more.

I know people are just trying to make a living out of photography videos on the internet, so it isn’t hard to be a decent person. Do better, YouTubers.

6. Substack folks and their engagement bait notes

This is a practice that I’ve been observing on the internet, and it is worse on Substack because it is an emerging platform with people eager to make genuine connections and grow together.

I noticed that some big Substackers create notes like “Photographers, post your work here” or “Let’s meet each other in this Note,” and nothing else. No further action.

Holy dears, people see what you are doing.

In case you don’t know, they are gaming the system by having people comment on their notes just to generate engagement, while genuinely not caring about what these people post.

Here’s what they can do if they really want to help: get the people who commented and recommend your publication in theirs. Whenever people subscribe to their giant, tens-of-thousands-of-followers publications, a percentage of subscribers will also subscribe to you.

That’s how they can help, in case they’re genuinely interested.

5. Photographers shoppers

This is a common one, and sometimes I fit myself in this category (who says I can’t criticize myself)?

There is a very fine difference between being a photographer and being someone who feels inspired to photograph due to new equipment.

Which one are you? I am not gonna lie, I like photographing with what I have, but sometimes my GAS speaks louder and I can’t resist getting new gear to feel inspired to photograph something. I am not perfect, and I sometimes put myself in this very list.

Here’s a possible solution: temporarily exchange gear with friends. That’s an interesting way to save money and not have to put your hands in your credit card in order to get inspired to photograph something.

I wrote about this here:

4. Photographers who make photography the least important thing when they are out photographing

“Let’s go have lunch” is the phrase I most worry about hearing when I am photographing with a group.

Oh shit, here we go.

They will get in the restaurant and stay there for three fucking hours while golden hour is becoming pee hour (same color, different meaning).

Here’s how it works, in case you missed science classes during middle school: the Sun orbits the Earth and a complete spin takes 24 hours. Thanks to humanity, who is greatly boiling the planet and causing “El Niño v2.0 - AI edition,” half of the year is either too cold or too hot to go out and photograph.

That reduces your “photography window” to roughly 6 hours per day. During these 6 hours, do yourself a favor and value photography. Value the light. Pay attention to the light, to the Sun. Leave the restaurant for dinner, when there’s no more light. Grab a quick sandwich, continue photographing during the afternoon, and don’t miss the golden hour.

3. Photowalk people photographing the very same thing

Monkey see great scene. Monkey press shutter button.

I think people don’t realize that you can get the most out of photowalks when socializing with other photographers. You’re not gonna get your photography Oscar award from a photo in a photowalk.

I am not stating this as a perfect guy who never did it. In fact, there are many nice shots I took during photowalks, but they are not particularly unique, ya know?

I’m not saying it’s prohibited to do that. Just be happy the way you are, that’s the most important.

2. Photography creators and the low bar

This one is a reflection of number 1. The other day, I was browsing social media, and I saw a guy saying “Are you familiar with the sLoW ShuTtEr TeChNiQuE?”

Curious, I watched the rest of the reel, only to discover that what the guy called the “slow shutter technique” consisted of photographs taken with a slower shutter speed, hence blurring what’s in motion.

Or worse, the ones that call any ordinary thing a “life hack!”, these are hillarious!

The other day I saw a guy saying that increasing the ISO on your camera is a life hack.

What kind of world are we living in right now?

1. Instagram

This one deserves a special place in the fucking hell.

To me, this platform is the number one destroyer of photography on Earth. Little by little, over decades, it imposed the vertical format, then promoted extremely saturated images, then it started showing ads in an insane 1:2 ratio. My Instagram feed is at a point where I basically see 2 posts per ad. Right now, it is full of AI Slop, accounts that steal other people’s content with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, reels with hundreds of images displayed in dozens of seconds, doomscrolling, dopamine needs, uncurated volume, the attention economy that replaced image quality, Meta glasses, etc. The list is infinite.

Some people say that Instagram didn’t destroy photography, just transformed it. Well, okay, you can tell it transformed it, but in my opinion, it transformed photography by trying to turn it into a garbage can.

I feel that we, real photographers, storytellers, and film advocates, are the last frontier to preserve art, history, and good-quality content before Mark destroys everything once and for all in trade for his trillions of dollars.

Instagram is the number one thing I hate about photography in 2026.

As an additional note with underestimated long-term social impact, the hunting for likes made it worse for people under social disadvantage to get serious photographic representation. I even reflected about this in a podcast episode here in CC.

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Then, two friends of mine (Brian and Walmyr) warned me: “next, you’re gonna like to get the digital back. You’re gonna say no now, but you will”.

“Bullshit”, I told them (that was one month ago, lol).

I got very happy with my new high-end, miracle of engineering, film camera, made some very cool shots with it, and got introduced (and quickly fall in love) with the square format, that I even wrote a post about it.

Quickly, the Hasselblad and it’s square format body dominated my soul, and all I wanted to do was to shoot with it. The SLR cube conquered me hard. I didn’t feel inspired to get any other camera to shoot, and I knew it was not just because the camera was new. There was something special in it.

Many people question me why film photographers have the need of owning multiple cameras, I think the ultimate answer is because each film camera has its own spirit.

Given that we hardly use film cameras for commercial work (but for fun instead), each camera sets a different stage when it’s time to choose the weapon of choice for photographing something. Sometimes you want a quick pocketable point-and-shoot, or the challenge of manual focus and the sharpness of a Leica lens, or sometimes you just want to shoot something that looks like an old camera, and here’s the reason why…

There is something special about using a camera that has a waist-level viewfinder, like the Hasselblads, some Mamiyas, Rolleiflex, etc., especially when shooting at the street.

It imposes a respect. Without saying a word, it tells “I am a photographer, don’t disturb me, and this, obviously, is fucking film, so you’d better not get in front of my shot.”

I say that because when I am using it on the street, people avoid passing in front of me on the sidewalk, that’s notorious. Either they pass behind me, or they wait for me to finish the shot. They notice there’s a photographer doing their thing. It sets a complete different stage in the photography scenario.

It imposes photographic authority.

I thought that Leica cameras were the pinnacle of conversation starters, because it is very common for people to reach out and sparkle a conversation about the Leica object I have hanging on my neck, but Hasselblads are even more insane with this. There isn’t a single time that I have the Hassie with me, that no one stops and ask questions, and the conversation is also different.

I think it’s because that this is the camera Man brought to the Moon for the first time. It’s an icon, but not like the M6 emoji 📷 (have you thought about it?).

It’s an icon that is recognizable for photography enthusiasts, landscapes, studio, and that usually sparkles a hot photography conversation, to a point I have to start carrying my photography business cards when I’m with the Hassel on me…

Anyway, back to the Hassel religion and the digital back story.

Brian and Walmyr told me that I woult not resist the temptation to get the 100 Megapixels digital back, the Hasselblad cfv 100c. Hasselblads always got notorious due to the fact that it’s fully modular. It’s the most modular camera ever. And with the digital back, I can just swap the film back to it when I’m tired of shooting digital.

Shit, that’s tempting.

In other words, I can carry the 503cw normally, and when I run out of film, or when I have photo FOMO, or when I’m just lazy to develop the films, I can swap the film back and I have a high-end sensor and image processing at the very film plane that the film back would provide.

I got it.

That means now I have a high-end digital camera, with no IBIS, no electronic rangefinder, but with a hell of an analog feel to it.

I made a video that will help you understand what I am talking about.

It’s such an interesting camera, and there are some things I love about it, which I will try to enumerate by order of priority from a film photographer’s mindset.

1. Reuse the V-system analog body - as described above;
2. The firmware simplicity - it’s a camera that takes photos and lets you see the photos. Period. No video, no crazy menus, it’s fucking simple;
3. Hasselblad’s color science - the 16bit HDR files are so good to work with;
4. When paired with film simulation software, it offers the best that both worlds (analog + film) can offer - let me double click on this…

Film simulation software with it

A huge advantage of the Hasselblad digital back is that you have a complete analog shooting experience, seriously, imagine having 16bit HDR RAW files with a shutter that sounds like this:

_{(Warning: ASMR)}

These files, once submitted to a film simulation software, will give you a very satisfactory end result in terms of color, grain, latitude, and everything. My two favorite film simulation softwares are the Dehancer and DxO Film Pack.

Take a look at these shots simulating a CineStill 50D. I think that the only consideration I must do here is that the 50D is a daylight film with a very low ISO, and I shot these under the shade, that’s not a real possibility :P

Here’s something interesting about film simulations and things I can do with this combo: I can now get the camera on a tripod, and shoot a specific film stock with a film back, and then swap the film back by the digital one, and process a film simulation, and do a more acurate comparison.

Would you like to see this in Camera Clara?

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FAQ

Q: Oh Raf! Is it the same thing as shooting film?

Of course not, and this discussion is kinda out of pointless among experienced photographers who know what they’re doing, and who know how to appreciate art.

Q: Oh Raf! Is it better than film?

Same answer as above :P

Q: RAF! Are you ruining the film experience?

Same answer as above :P

Q: OhRaf! Is this cheating? People think you’re shooting film but you’re not!

Do you pay for my film? Do you develop it? Do you fund my film photography journey? No? Do a litlte favor for both of us, hit the unsubscribe and get the f* outta here 😂. I do whatever I want with my photos. Go study culture and stop being an asshole. D

_{(I’m kidding, I’M KIDDING, JUST KIDDING, it’s a joke, don’t hit unsubscribe .I love you 🥹)}

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Also, if you want to learn more about the Hasselblad V-system, I suggest watching the below live streaming where my friend Brian teaches everything about it:

I tried to gather as much information as possible and add it to each photo’s caption, hoping to bring you the same feeling I had when looking at these in person, where I could get close and inspect the brush strokes, the texture, the patina, the cracking. If you are knowledgeable about painting, please add some interesting information in the comments section, as I’d love to learn more!

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Those fine vertical striations running through the flesh tones are the oak panel's grain telegraphing through the ground and paint layers after 470 years of the wood moving. Isn’t that incredible?

The 100-megapixel sensor allows some aggressive cropping, and it's such a joy because I can see the photos inside the photos I take. I think this is Hasselblad's main superpower. I hope you appreciate it as well!

I arrived at the museum at around 4:10 PM, and it closed at 5, so I rushed a little and didn't have time to photograph the little description next to every artwork. I looked them up online afterward and tried to include as many links and references as possible. Some are impressively old, going back 500 years.

This is a special one. It’s SO BIG. I think it’s the biggest paint I’ve ever seen. Look to the description plates underneath and you can have a feeling about the size.

This one was delightful. Looks like large format photography, check out the details!

This epic painting honors a critical turning point in the American colonists’ war against Great Britain. It was a great success in Leutze’s native Germany, given the country’s own revolutionary fervor of the period, as well as in the United States, where it quickly became an iconic image, frequently recast by later artists.

Evoking patriotic feelings in some viewers, conflict and struggle in others, this unavoidable highlight of the American Wing continues to spark debates about political ideas. It is exhibited here in a reproduction of its original trophy-style frame, based on a photograph by Mathew B. Brady.

Hope you enjoyed seeing these details, as much as I enjoyed registering it!
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First thought: dead battery. I use this camera a lot, so it happens. Luckily the M7 has two mechanical shutter speeds, 1/60 and 1/125, that fire even with no power at all. I was already using an external light meter (something I recommend to everyone, honestly), so I just locked the speed at 1/125, opened up to f/16 with ISO 400, and kept shooting.

Got home, swapped both batteries. Same thing. Dead.

People warned me about this. When I bought the M7, more than one person said something like: “you’re buying a thirty year old camera full of electronics, and if that breaks, you’re in trouble”. I ignored them and bought it anyway.

Now I’m paying for it. Probably a flat cable, or some fucking connector inside gave up. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re getting into film photography and picking your first camera, think twice before choosing anything with an electronic shutter. A Hasselblad 500 series has no light meter and no electronics at all, the shutter lives in the lens, not the body. That means more lenses exist than bodies (manufacturers make several lenses per camera), so if a shutter dies, you swap the lens and keep shooting while the broken one gets repaired.

My new rule now is: anything with electronics inside, once it’s past thirty years old, is a risk. My Leica MP has no such problem. MP stands for “mechanical perfection”, and it earns the name, I pulled the batteries out and it still fires at every speed, meter or no meter. Some people bullshit around buying the Leica thas has no light meter, that’s bullshit, because you can buy an MP and take the batteries off…

There’s another upside to fully mechanical cameras: mechanical parts can be reproduced. 3D printing has made it possible for repair communities to remake old parts that manufacturers stopped making years ago, a door latch here, a shutter release button there... Electronics don’t work that way. Once a chip or a flex cable is gone, it’s gone, and if they’re old, you’re pretty much under the bus.

My M7 is at DAG Camera repair now. Probably $500, probably two weeks without it. And honestly, this is exactly why I think the Leica M6 beats the M7 in 2026, at least for anyone buying a first rangefinder. The M6 has no electronic shutter, so there’s nothing in there to die on you mid-roll.

Film is already an expensive hobby, and it keeps getting more expensive. So if you’re shopping for a first camera, my advice is simple: skip anything with an electronic shutter, even if it was made recently. My M7 was manufactured decades ago and it still caught me off guard.

I’m seriously thinking about selling the M7 once it’s back and picking up an M3 or an M4-P instead. But my MP is a battle horse, and it’s not going anywhere.

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A friend of mine works in the film industry. He bought a full roll of Kodak Verita 200D, the stock Kodak built for Euphoria season 3, and respooled part of it into 35mm canisters for me. That’s the only reason I have this film. Kodak doesn’t sell it to photographers. There’s no 135 version, no 120 version, nothing you can order. It exists only as a motion picture product, available by request through a Kodak sales rep, meant for productions shooting hundreds of thousands of feet at a time. I shot two rolls on my Leica M7 anyway.

What verita 200D actually is

Kodak built this stock with Euphoria cinematographer Marcell Rév, chasing a look closer to older film emulsions than the clean, flexible Vision3 line. Technically, it’s the ECN-2 version of Portra 400. Same emulsion family, different chemistry, different name depending on who’s selling it. Rated at ISO 200, balanced for daylight, with no remjet backing. Instead, it uses an anti-halation undercoat that is very efficient, and an anti-static layer that survives the developing process.

The remjet part matters a lot. Remjet is the black backing on most cinema film, and it’s a pain to remove. Without it, this stock opens a door most cinema film keeps shut.

The film does an excellent job on the anti-halation without having an anti halation layer. As a comparison, check out the same shot with the Verita 200 and a CineStill 800T, shot in the same lighting conditions.

Which one do you prefer?

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Why I ran it through C-41

I have a C-41 kit at home, and that’s the chemistry I’m used to. I also own ECN-2 chemicals, but the process is more involved and I haven’t built the habit around it yet, so I didn’t wanna risk. Since Verita has no remjet, cross-processing it in C-41 is possible, and that’s the part of this review I actually want to write about for you.

A lot of photographers who hear about Verita assume two things:

First, that it’s out of reach.

Second, that even if you get your hands on it, you need ECN-2 to make it work.

Neither has to be true. I ran both rolls through C-41 and the results held up. You can judge for yourself from the images.

Smoke, Sun, and one pushed roll

I shot part of this in Hoboken during the days when smoke from Canadian wildfires sat over the city. Low contrast, flat light, that particular haze that makes everything low contrast by nature. I think it suited the film. Verita has a shorter dynamic range than Vision3 by design, and a scene that’s already compressed in contrast gives it less work to do.

I also shot on a clear, sunny day, and got photos from the second roll from ISO to 400 in development. That push made sense on paper too. C-41 stocks usually need about a stop more exposure to reach the same density as their ECN-2 version, which is part of why Portra 400 becomes a 200-speed film once it’s built for cinema chemistry. Check out the results:

The magenta and the blue

Some frames, especially the ones from Washington Square Park, show a clear shift toward magenta in the highlights, with blue creeping into some of the tones as well. Kodak’s own documentation says this stock leans magenta in highlights even under normal ECN-2 processing. Cross-process it in C-41 and the effect gets more visible.

If this was just a difference in dye color between the two processest, shadows and highlights would shift together and a simple correction would fix the whole frame. What’s happening is closer to a chemical clash. The color developer’s pH is different between ECN-2 and C-41, and so is the development time and temperature. That changes how fast each emulsion layer develops relative to the others, and the mismatch shows up strongest where the image is brightest. but I like it :)

How it stacks up against Portra? You might ask!

The negatives dried flat. No curling, no warping, something I can’t always say about other cinema stocks I’ve cross-processed at home. I’d guess that comes down to the missing remjet layer more than anything else.

Is it worth chasing?

Honestly, no. Not because the film is bad. It looks great, and the C-41 cross-process holds up better than I expected. But it’s Portra 400 wearing a different label, and Portra is one order away. If you happen to know someone in the film industry who can get you a roll of Verita, you’re getting a five-dollar Portra. Fun to shoot once. Not a reason to go looking for a connection you don’t already have.

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The Kodak Ektar 100 is the only color negative film that makes me feel like I’m shooting slide without the slide-film stress. Punchy, contrasty, saturated almost past the point of believable. People online call it the finest-grain color film Kodak makes, the marketing is honest for this film stock.

It's a fil stock with strong opinions, meaning if you shoot against them and you’ll be annoyed, but if you shoot with them, you walk away with postcards like the ones you're about to see in this post.

The blues, we have to talk about the blues

Look at that cloud. That deep, slightly cyan blue is Ektar doing what it does, and it’s why I load it for skies, water, anything with a real blue in it.

Ektar wants sun. If you hand it a flat grey day, the color goes quiet, sometimes a little cold. Hand it hard daylight and it sings. I meter for the shadows like any negative film, but I don’t push into overexposure the way I would with Portra, because Ektar’s highlights leave sooner. Look at roof of the car below: the bright edges are sitting right at the top of the range, almost gone. One more stop and they’d be blank paper, but if you nail the exposure, the film delivers.

That old farm truck is my saturation test. The blue body is shouting, the orange lines on the lettering holds, and it still looks like a real truck on real gravel. That’s the line this film walks. Light, colors, and contrast (but not too much).

Fine grain, and why it scans so clean

People assume the fine grain is Ektar’s secret. But Ektar and Portra run the same grain tech, T-grain, so that’s not where the difference lives…

Quick version for anyone who hasn’t met the term. Most film uses chunky, pebble-shaped silver crystals. T-grain uses flat, tabular ones that catch light better and pack tighter, so you get finer grain and sharper edges at the same film speed. Kodak built it for the T-Max b&w films first.

Ektar scans so clean!! I’ve pulled detail out of these negatives I had no right to get.

A landscape film (and that’s quite the point)

If you remember one thing, remember that Ektar is built for scenery. Bridges, water, stone, big open sky. The internet mostly agrees, and so do I !

That George Croton Dam (above) frame is everything I want from a roll of it. Deep sky, white water, warm old stone, every tone separated cleanly. Shots like this are why I forgive the price. I wish I had it in my last trip to Mexico, where I visited the Chichén Itzá pyramid…

Where Ektar breaks: skin in hard sun

Now the honest part. Ektar and faces don’t always get along.

The skin gets kinda muddy, the blue steals the scene, and there’s no fixing it without wrestling the scan :P

This is the thing everyone warns you about, and they’re right. But another thing is also right: if you have lots of blue in your scene, think about Ektar. I’ve been shootng with that mindset from now on!

As I said before, the film likes contrast, but the more hard is the light you get, the harder it gets to have domain over the contrast on skin color. When I am shooting the Ektar 100 in sun light, I usually wait for a cloud to pass by to redice the contrast of harsh lights, so it purposefly reduces the contrast a little bit, and even though…

Reds, browns, and yellows

There’s more here than blue. The reds and browns are surprisingly excellent.

Especially the browns.

That cow is the only 35mm shot in this set, and it tells me two things. The browns are rich and deep, no mud, which I happen to like for animals. The 120 is cleaner and glassier, better for the big scenic work. I’ve been reaching for 120 more lately, mostly because the Hassel forces me to slow down.

Those roses make the case. Delicate pinks, deep greens, a restraint people forget Ektar has in it.

Technical stuff about the shots above

When we talk too much about film and colors, there’s always one who will come saying that scanning and converting means everything, and they’re not wrong, so it worth talking a little bit about the computer part of the above shots.

With the exception of the cow shot, all photos were scanned with a Fujifilm GFX 100s camera and a vintage and perfect Pentax macro lens at f/16. The shots are 102 Megapixel each, so I am using one of the best cameras for the DSLRscan job available in 2026.

The negatives (with exception for the cow shot) were converted with Negative Lab Pro using one of the default presets.

I know it’s not clinical like a Fujifilm Frontier, or a Noritsu scanner. For those, I need you to subscribe so I can get funds, LOL.

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Price, and where it sits

A roll of 35mm runs around sixteen dollars right now (June 2026), which puts it over Kodak Gold and under Portra 400. For a professional film with this grain and this color, that middle slot feels fair to me.

Buy Ektar 100 35mm

Buy Ektar 100 120 film

(I link B&H because that’s where I actually buy my film. These above are affiliate links, it costs you nothing extra and helps keep Camera Clara independent. If you are buying films, do the pro choice and prefer buying from B&H because they store the film in refrigerators, that’s something nobody talks about. Thanks, you’re welcome, haha)

Should you shoot it?

If you shoot scenery, skies, water, architecture, anything where you want color to land hard, yes, today. If you shoot mostly people, keep one roll for soft-light days and load Portra for the rest.

I always keep a few in the fridge at all times. It’s the closest I get to the slide-film look without the slide-film headache, and some days that alone is reason enough to carry a camera.

What do you shoot Ektar for? Do you like it?

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The theory behind the two is simple. The practice is not, and knowing which one to use is fundamental.

Starting with the incident meter, or the one with the little white dome on top. You hold it where your subject is and it reads the light falling onto that spot, ignoring what the subject is made of. Dark coat, white wall, doesn’t matter. It measures the light itself, in absolute terms. Shadows read as shadows, highlights read as highlights. That’s why people call it the more accurate reading. You’re measuring incoming light, not the individual light that objects in front of you reflect.

The downside is you have to get close to the subject, or at least stand in the same light conditions. If you’re under a tree in the shade, photographing a billboard baking in the sun, the light at your feet and the light hitting the billboard are two different conditions. An incident reading from where you stand would be wrong. That’s the moment a reflective meter shines.

A reflective meter is the most common one, and also the way more complicated to use. It’s what lives inside your camera. It reads the light that objects reflect back, based on where you point it. Dark things reflect less, so they read dark. Bright things reflect more, so they read bright. Aim it somewhere else and you get a different number, and that's why I say it's more complicated to use.

The easiest way to see this is with a black and white image in your head, that's because B&W images are just a range of blacks, shadows, whites, and highlights on grayscale.

This is where reflective metering gets tricky: where to meter? Where to point the camera at? The complexity comes from the fact that measuring in different places will give you different readings, unlike the incident meter, which gives you an acurate and absolute reading.

For example: imagine a wedding. Do you point at the bride’s white dress or the groom’s dark suit? Two readings, far apart, and neither one is right on its own…

“When in doubt, aim in the middle" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The honest answer is to meter on something neutral, so the shadows naturally fall dark and the highlights stay bright the way they’re meant to. Your film (or sensor) should have a dynamic range wide enough to hold the shadows and the highlights without clipping. When the scene is high contrast and the two ends sit too far apart, you’re in what I think of as a short blanket situation. The blanket can’t cover your head and your feet at once. You pick one. The dynamic range is the blanket.

Also, if this isn't complex enough, there’s a calibration detail underneath all this. These meters are benchmarked against 18% gray. So if you’re on the street and spot a plain gray sidewalk, that’s a good place to set your exposure. Not dark, not bright.

You won’t always have a gray target though. Back to the wedding situation. if you meter off the white dress, the meter will instruct your exposure to turn it into 18% gray, so the dress comes out muddy instead of white, and it should be white, not gray...

Same trap with the dark suit, just the other direction.

Have you experienced that? Share your story in the comments.

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So when there’s no gray to lean on, you carry the rule yourself. What’s bright in real life wants +1 EV to stay bright. What’s dark wants -1 EV to stay dark, with the steps in between. This is the whole reason to shoot in manual, or to learn the exposure compensation feature in your camera, instead of trusting the meter blindly, metering like a newbie and pressing the shutter release button without knowing what you're doing…

The last piece, and a little more advanced, is knowing your dynamic range in stops, for your film or your camera. Look it up on the internet, it’s easy to find. Keep your darks and brights inside that range, and keep the short blanket in mind. Some litght meters allow you to store measurements in memory and calculate the delta in between (some even give you a scale so you can see if you're exceeding a pre-configured dynamic range, the Sekonic ones do that…)

Sometimes, especially on photowalks under the Sun, I like carrying an incident light meter because it's more "set and forget”, and I end up getting consistent exposures that follow the light along my day, that is -that is- if light conditions don't change (like clouds passing by), of course.

This is why using an external light meter requires you being more attentious and aware of your surroundings, you become more familiar with light changes, you remove the crutch, and ultimately, you become a better photographer.

Here are some photos I took using an incident light meter, the Sekonic L-308X-U. Exposure is nailed in every single one, edits are minimal, as you can see per the film border, which is always black, and with consistent coloring on the lettering.

Using a light meter and observing light while shooting is an important exercise that will let you enjoy correctly exposed photographs more and more.

Film cupping, or warping, happens for a bunch of reasons. It can come from the way the film was stored, humidity and temperature differences during the dev process, the drying, or who knows what. What we know is that it’s a frustrating problem, and it usually gets worse the larger the film gets. When I shoot medium format (120), I sometimes end up with rolls that look like the back of a guitar neck.

Leaving them inside books isn’t usually an option, because you need books long enough to cover the whole length of the film (God forbid you use multiple books). Laying it on a flat table doesn’t help either, because you need the table for something else. And besides, books are meant to be read, not used as shelves, door stops, or anything other than read.

I tried a lot of techniques to unwarp film, some of them drastic and shitty, like ironing the film with a towel over it. That destroyed the emulsion every single time. I searched online, including forums, YouTube, and Reddit, and couldn’t find anything that actually worked, just a bunch of crap. That’s why I decided to write this ridiculously simple post.

I figured out two ways to do it passively, without an extra heater, cabinet, blower, or whatever. That helps me keep the instructions assertive and short. Great.

I call these methods the “Backwards Respooling” and the “Backwards Mini Roll.” They’re pretty simple, obvious even, but when you’re desperate with a cupped roll, you don’t think about the obvious.

First, it’s CRUCIAL that the film is COMPLETELY DRY before you try any flattening. With that settled, it’s time for some film chiropractic sessions…

Method #1: The Backwards respooling

For this method, you’re going to roll the film back into the reel, but this time with the concave side OUT (usually the emulsion, but not always). You’ll notice the film doesn’t want to go back onto the spool, because it’s warped and probably conditioned to roll the other way. You might have to route it correctly into the reel for the first loop. Wear cloth gloves for this. Here’s what it should look like:

This method is the least invasive and safer than the second one, though it might take longer to work. The upside is that you can monitor the process along the way by inspecting the reel. Finish rolling it with the concave side out and wait. Since the spool holds the film on both sides, it stays flat and you don’t risk overdoing it.

Close the full loop, and wait…

After 16+ hours, you should have a flat film.

Method #2: The Backwards Mini Roll

I’d risk saying this method is a CameraClara exclusive, because I haven’t seen anyone else do it. I came up with it and refined the process along the way.

It’s more invasive, but more effective. Ideal for extreme warps that look more like the third letter of the alphabet (”C”, in case you missed the reference).

Again, make sure the film is completely dry, or it will stick to itself and jam the whole thing.

You’re going to reuse the backing paper from when you loaded the film into the spool. Grab the adhesive and form a little roll that works as a container, then build a library of them. Here’s a photo of what RafLabs looks like, for instance:

When rolling it back to fit in the cylinder you made, be careful not to scratch the emulsion. Roll it with the concave side out, between your fingers, and pull the tail of the film while holding the other side with your thumb and index finger to reduce the diameter of the roll. Reduce it until it fits one of the pre-made containers.

It will look like this:

Another reason I keep multiple backing paper cylinders is that if I want to open one and inspect, I can just toss it. You don’t want to scratch the film against the paper while it’s tensioned, so to monitor progress you’d have to peel the adhesive and unfold the whole backing paper. You can reassemble it afterward, but it’s just more practical to recycle and grab another one.

When you roll the film to fit the paper cylinder, you might feel you’re doing the wrong thing, forcing it into an uncomfortable position. But remember these films are used to it. They came in a roll tighter than a sardine can, got stored for months (sometimes years, even decades!), and never complained about it on Reddit like humans do.

PS: If you’re doing this with 35mm film, save the plastic tub the canister came in and do it in there. That should be enough, the logic is the same.

Leave a comment if you liked it, disliked it, approved, disapproved, or if you have other techniques. I want to learn and hear from you too!

Thanks for reading ❤️

Converting your own scans is the part of film photography nobody puts on a postcard. I scan with the film borders, so a big chunk of my time goes into cropping, rotating, fixing the rebate, then moving the file from one piece of software to another because the white balance broke or the gamma got encoded wrong somewhere along the way. It works. It’s also a small pile of hacks I’ve made peace with over the years.

So when Yahya Rahhawi reached out about a converter he’s building, I was curious in a tired way. I’ve seen a lot of these. Most do one thing well and leave you needing three other apps to finish the job. My friend told me “I’ve used just about every conversion app out there, and this one by far has been the most complete”. And I completely agree! I’m on the same boat, also used tons of software, and EmberFilm is very promising!

Yahya and I sat down on a Camera Clara livestream and went through an entire roll together, live, with negatives I had scanned that same morning. I’ll post some of the results here, but I strongy recommend watching the whole video.

Yahya is a solo developer. He’s a computer science student finishing his degree, he started shooting black and white in a high school darkroom about four years ago, and the app, EmberFilm, grew out of his own frustration with the conversion process (we’ve all been there!). Before this he made a small open source tool that only removed dust. That one got enough good feedback that he kept going, and EmberFilm is the result of a few months of work and more than fifty beta testers texting him every single day.

What got me is how much is already in there for a first release.

The part I want people to understand first is the AI, because the words “AI” and “film scanning” in the same sentence usually make us all nervous. The software uses machine learning for dust detection, for the auto crop that finds your frame inside the border, and for white balance. The dust model is the clever one. It reads the actual RGB pixels, no infrared channel, and it still finds the specks and paints them out while keeping the grain intact.

And all that runs on locally on the machine.

I repeat. Every single AI feature runs in my machine only. Nothing gets uploaded. Your scans never leave your laptop, the models are compressed to run locally, and there’s no account, no cloud, no app quietly phoning home to a server somewhere. Yahya was clear about this on the stream and I think it matters. This is a good use of AI.

The other thing I kept noticing was the one button conversion. You import the roll, you hit convert, and the scans come out looking right. That sounds basic. A lot of converters still get it wrong, and you end up babysitting every frame to make it usable. EmberFilm treats a project like a roll, reads the white balance once, and keeps it consistent across the whole strip, which is most of what I actually want from a converter.

Now the part I cared about most. EmberFilm doesn’t push its own look on you. It doesn’t bake in a LUT to fake a “filmic” result and call it a day. It pulls the information out of the negative, the way a Frontier or a Noritsu does, and hands you a clean, flexible file you can take wherever you want. If you feel like adding a print look later, you can. That’s your call, not the app deciding for you. Portra 400 should look like Portra 400. One version of it, please.

We hit a couple of bugs on the stream. An export that failed, a zoom that crashed because I zoomed in to roughly a billion percent. Beta things. None of it changed my read. The conversions were fast on 80-something megabyte GFX files, the memory use stayed around half a gigabyte, and the results were genuinely good.

EmberFilm is Mac only for now, still in beta, with a waitlist on the site. No firm release date yet.

Info and Links

The app lives at emberfilm.app, where you can join the beta waitlist. The instagram is @emberfilm.app.

One flag: there’s also an Instagram account called @ember_films (plural, with an underscore), that one does NOT belong to the app rather than some unrelated video outfit. Check it before you link it.

This was our first livestream with Yahya and I doubt it’ll be the last. He’s that rare developer who’s also the user, and I want to keep following where this goes. For the record, nobody paid for this post. I just liked the software and contacted him out via Instagram. Thank you, Yahya! 💪 🇮🇶 🎞️ ✨

Last Saturday I went anyway. Weekend, sure. Crowded, yes. I brought the Hassel and a roll of Ektar and figured I would just deal with the people, wait until I had clean frames, things like that.

The cherry blossoms were long gone. June offers a different game. Roses everywhere, meadow flowers doing their loose, messy thing. I think summer might be the honest season here. If Spring is the postcard, June is the garden actually living.

Without a proper light meter, I followed the Sunny16 rule, which barely fails. If yo udon't know the Sunny16, it's pretty simple: on a sunny day, you use 1/ISO as shutter speed (1/100 if ISO100, 1/400 if ISO400, etc.), and set your aperture to f/16. Done! You are in EV 15 zone, typical for shooting under sunlight.

Since my camera doesn't have a 1/100 shutter speed, I used 1/125 - it's fine. Exposure was not always perfect, but I was able to slightly push/pull some sliders when converting, and voilá. Look at these Ektar 100 colors…

Ektar was a deliberate choice here, I left home with it loaded in the camera. It is the most saturated color negative Kodak makes nowadays (finest grain too). People describe it as slide film with a safety net, all that punch and contrast but with the forgiving latitude of a negative. And i agree!

Bright daylight is exactly when Ektar comes alive. I am happy with the results!

By the way, Camera Clara runs on no sponsors and no ad money. If these posts are worth something to you, a paid subscription is what keeps them coming, and keeps me honest about what I actually shoot! Join the club!

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What it wanted, it turns out, looked right. The blues went deep and a little electric, the reds stayed rich, and the cool cast sat on the chrome in a way I liked more than a "correct" version would have. There is no right or wrong here. There is the film you have and the cars in front of you, and sometimes they just agree.

I went in expecting halation because I could see it coming when framing: little stars of specular light bouncing off bumpers, off a hood, off a headlight rim. 800T is known for haloing those bright points in red, and in a dark night scene it can bloom hard. Here, in daylight at box speed, the highlights were small and tight, so the red glow stayed gentle, I like saying the’re sexy without being too vulgar, looks like medium format. A soft ring around a headlight instead of an explosion. On 35mm that restraint reads as elegant rather than a gimmick. I'll take it.

The cars earned the trip. There was a deep blue Maserati with a tartan umbrella tossed on the rear shelf and a sticker in the window telling the diet exactly where to go, which felt like the most honest thing at the whole event. A red Mercedes 380SL on Jersey plates, parked next to a white roadster wearing a small American flag. A dark blue Ferrari with a period New York plate, all that bodywork folding the sky into itself.

And then the one I keep coming back to. I half-recognized it on the day, and a little digging confirmed it: the red roadster on my last three frames is a 1957 BMW 507, brought by Gooding Christie's as the auction centerpiece. BMW built only a few hundred, and this was one of 34 Series 1 cars. I didn't know any of that when I shot it. I just liked the shape. The giveaway is sitting right there in my interior frames, two little Christie's cushions on the seats. I photographed the star of the morning without realizing it.

This is the part where I say something about Leica, and I mean it. The store didn’t need to host a car meet. It did, with Duane Wilson of Porsche Stimmung, because the people who fuss over a hand-built lens are usually the same ones who notice a perfectly set ride height. That overlap is the whole point. Leica stays a strong brand less for any single camera and more for mornings like this one, where the gear is the excuse and the community is the thing that actually shows up. You don’t build that with a spec sheet.

I have more frames from that day still waiting, shot on Kodak VERITA 200D (the new prohibited film for photographers), the new daylight-balanced cinema stock that I’m about to run through ECN-2 at home. After a roll of tungsten film bent to fit a sunny morning, I want to see what a film that actually wants the daylight does with the same cars. More on that when it’s dry.

I’ll do another post when I develop the ECN-2 film. Don’t send that to Kodak.

If you like this kind of thing, film, old cars, and the small accidents that make a frame, subscribe to Camera Clara and pass it to the one friend who’ll get it.

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Here is the project I mentioned: Hope in Shadows.

You can find their website here. It’s such a beautiful and nice project!

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And there it was. Blue and orange across the top of the buildings, as expected, the Empire State Building leading the line. The river caught all of it and threw it back in purple and orange, the Knicks colors.

I shot this on the Fujifilm GFX 100s. Tripod, long exposure, the water doing most of the work. 53 years of waiting, and the whole skyline knew it. I intentionally happened to be across the river with my camera!

If you know a Knicks fan and would like to give them a gift (as well as support an independent photographer like myself), I made prints of this. Note that shipping is included (and that’s half of the price).

Manhattan Knicks 2026 - Fine Art Print

I can sign the photo upon request. Buy it on the link below.

Manhattan Knicks 2026 - Fine Art Print

Shooting CineStill 800T in there felt right, the tungsten lights bouncing off metal shelves, that signature halation glowing around every bulb in the dark corridors. Funny how the reading room gets all the attention but the real magic is in the machinery behind it, the Arabic boxes, the Valentine's Manuals from the 1920s, books from 1860, the endless rows of newspaper. Huge thanks to the Kimi who let me see it all.

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A tiny piece of history

Leica released this design in 1998. It is a five-element, five-group block focusing formula. One polished aspherical element. Two anomalous partial dispersion glass elements. Two high-refractive-index elements. Anodized aluminum body, built-in slide-out hood, 55mm filter thread. Minimum focus is 1 meter, reproduction ratio 1:9, weight approximately 480 grams. The full specification can be found here.

A historical note worth knowing. This was the first Leica lens to use a polished asphere rather than a pressed one. That manufacturing leap is what unlocked the apochromatic correction. Real APO means the lens brings three wavelengths of light to the same focal plane (most lenses correct only two). It is the optical definition of “no excuses.”

On a Leica M body

The lens weighs approximately 480 grams. It's heavy. On an M body, it pulls forward noticeably. I find myself supporting the front with my left hand by default, which I rarely do with a 35 or 50.

The 90mm frame line on the MP is small. It lives inside the larger 28mm frame, the two are shown together as a pair when you mount the lens. This is the part film shooters need to internalize. You compose inside a postage stamp. If you shoot mostly with 35 and 50, your eye needs to recalibrate, orf you get a Light Lens Lab 1.4x viewfinder magnifier.

What APO means on film

This is where things get interesting. APO correction is talked about constantly in digital reviews. On film the conversation is different.

For color negative work, APO correction shows up in two concrete ways. First, edge transitions on high-contrast subjects stay clean. Color fringing on backlit subjects is effectively absent. Second, skin tones hold their gradation into the shadows rather than collapsing.

On Portra 400, which already renders skin with a lot of latitude and subtlety, the APO design means you are not losing tonal information to chromatic aberration on top of everything else the emulsion is doing. The two work in the same direction…

Wide open behavior

At f/2 the lens is already sharp corner to corner. This is unusual for a fast tele. Most 90mm lenses ask you to stop down to f/4 to clean up. Not this one. Resolution wide open easily out-resolves any 35mm film stock, which is exactly the point. The bottleneck is be the emulsion, not the glass.

Vignetting is the number that surprises people. Fast telephoto lenses routinely show more than one stop of light falloff wide open, with some over two stops. This lens measures as essentially negligible at f/2.

For portraits this matters more than in landscape work, because a corner that is even a third of a stop darker will read differently in the skin tones of a face at the frame edge. On Portra 400 that kind of subtle density shift would be visible.

Stopping down one stop to f/2.8 produces a slight but measurable improvement, as the lens is not quite at its absolute peak wide open, but it is close enough that the difference is irrelevant on film. By f/4 it is fully resolved. Diffraction starts to soften the image around f/11. The practical sharpness window for film is f/2 through f/8, with f/4 being the sweet spot for architecture and anything requiring corner-to-corner uniformity.

One caveat for night work: bokeh from point light sources shows visible onion-ring structures due to the aspherical element. On film grain softens it, but it is present. Portra 400 at night around city lights will surface it in bright highlights. It rarely ruins a frame, but you should know it exists.

Focusing it on a rangefinder

The honest part. Depth of field at f/2 and 1 meter is shallow enough that the math works out close to a 50mm f/1.1. On the unmagnified 0.72x finder of an M body, that is hard.

I miss focus more often with this lens than with anything else in my bag. Not by a lot. But enough to matter. A 1.25x or 1.4x viewfinder magnifier helps. So does shooting at f/2.8 or f/4 when the situation allows it.

If your M rangefinder is even slightly out of calibration, you will see it here first. Wide open at minimum focus distance is the most punishing test of rangefinder accuracy in any 35mm system.

Bokeh and rendering

Bokeh is smooth in most situations. Out-of-focus highlights are round in the center and start to lemon-shape toward the corners by f/2.8. Stopping down brings back inwardly curved aperture blade artifacts on bright spots.

Where it falls short

The size and weight cut against the M-system ethos. This is not a walkaround lens for a long day.

The minimum focus distance of 1 meter is conservative. The 75 APO Summicron focuses to 0.7m and gets you significantly more dramatic separation as a result. The 90 also lacks a floating element, which the 75 has, so close-distance performance is technically a notch behind in optical terms.

Price is hard to justify on rational grounds. New it is around $6k. Used in good condition runs roughly two to three thousand. The Voigtlander APO-Skopar 90 f/2.8 covers most of the optical performance for a fraction of the cost, but I got one and had to return because it came with focus misaligned, that's how I ended getting this Leica lens, I paid $2k on mine in absolute Mint condition, a rare find.

Final take

This is the most optically perfect lens I have ever put on a film camera. There is no character in the old Mandler sense. No glow. No softness. It renders what is in front of it with brutal precision. For some film shooters that will feel sterile. For documentary work and landscape it is exactly right. I personally like relying on the film stock for personality, like the 800T halation, etc.

The deeper question is that film is forgiving. Grain hides detail. The very things APO correction was designed to eliminate, like color fringing, aberrations, tonal collapse, which are sometimes the things that give older glass its look. So you have to ask yourself what you actually want from a 90mm.

For me the answer leans yes. Portra 400 and the APO work in the same direction because the film handles the character, the lens handles the precision.

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The first contact sheet made it obvious. my pictures are now more frontal, more centered, more symmetric than anything I shoot on 35mm (or with any other rectangular ratio). The square ratio forced me to read the scene differently. With no long side to lean on, I had to rethink where the element sits, which is not a hard task, I must say though, because I can just aim for the center and it yelds great results!

There’s a name for when the media of something makes you change the content of it, and it comes from outside photography. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message (which by a typo from the editor, became “massage”, and he kept it that way). The short version of the idea: the form of a medium reshapes how we perceive things, more than the content it carries. Television changed us more than any specific show ever did. The format works on you before the content arrives.

Back to McLuhan, the frame is a medium too. The rectangular frame most of us shoot is not a law of nature. It came from cinema film running sideways through early cameras. We inherited it and treated it as neutral.

Inside a square, the rule of thirds loses much of its force. My compositions weren’t working, so I stopped reaching for it and started centering subjects, looking for symmetry, photographing things head on, and it worked pretty much well on the square format! A good reminder that the rule of thirds was always a rule, never a law by the way…

It helps that this camera is an SLR, meaning I see through the lens, on a focusing screen with a cross etched in the middle. I can square up a façade and level a horizon with a precision my rangefinders never allowed. Framelines guess. A ground glass shows. More satisfaction to things at the center of stuff.

In a rectangle I’m always fighting the corners, pushing out things that don’t belong to the image. The wider the lens, the worse the battle. The square does part of that exclusion for me. Less frame to manage, more attention left for what I actually want in the picture, when paired to a 80mm, it becomes easy and inspiring to go out to shoot with. It’s at the same time more simple, more primary, and… more beautiful.

Square format is awesome!

Part of what drew me to this system is that everything is modular. Body, lens, finder, film back, all separate pieces. The plan is to add a digital back someday and turn half of my analog kit into a digital camera overnight. That’s a future post, and only milions of subscribers would be able to help me funding a Hasselblad digital back!

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Thanks ( ꩜ ᯅ ꩜ ) — means a lot !

Ah! And one bonus I didn’t see coming. Instagram wants vertical. Substack reads horizontal on a desktop. For my whole life I’ve been quietly shooting for two masters, and it’s annoying as hell. The square is the one format both accept without complaint. One photograph, two homes? Score!

Of course you don’t need a fancy camera to play the square game photo thing, and here’s my invitation. Crop a few favorites to 1:1 and watch what survives. Better yet, dig through your camera’s menu for the setting that records square, so the viewfinder shows you a square while you shoot. Cropping changes the file. Composing in a square changes the photographer. I suggest you trying out (and posting the results in the comments section!).

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In this episode I talk about the technical and philosophical differences between shooting film and digital. Not in a gear way. More in a mindset way. Why film forces you to read light differently, what the ISO lock teaches you about creative constraints, why the contact sheet is the most honest mirror a photographer can have, and what happens to your thinking when you only have 36 frames left.

Leave a comment below or write to podcast@cameraclara.com. I’ll read your messages in the next episode. It's my first time doing this, so please also let me know what do you think about the overall thing: did I do it right? What would you like to listen? How about the form and structure?

And also, subscribe to CameraClara here on Substack, as that helps me a ton!

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As you can see, the PAN 200 has enough latitude in the emulsion that I could push the contrast slider pretty hard in post without things falling apart. Highlights stayed under control, shadows held detail. The PAN 100 is cleaner, great for bright daylight. Both were shot on my Mamiya 7ii and developed by myself. I didn’t pull or push. Shot both stocks at box speed.

The grain

I’ll add some 1:1 crops here so you can see exactly what you’re working with at full resolution. Scanned on a GFX 100s at 102 MP.

The grain on the 200 is what I’d call honest. It looks like 200 ISO film should look. Controlled, present, not trying to fake the smoothness of a 100. But the real surprise is the 100. The grain structure is genuinely good, maybe the best thing about this stock. At 1:1 you can see it’s tight and even, nothing muddy or chunky about it.

The Tri-X comparison nobody asked for but I’m making anyway :P

I’ve been shooting Tri-X for some time now. It’s a classic for a reason. But recently I’ve had a few quality control issues: faded lettering on the film strip, and weird tonal shifts across different frames of the same roll. That’s not something you expect from a professional-grade emulsion.

The Kentmere is cheaper and, at least in my recent testing, more consistent. I’m not ready to say it’s a better film in every way, but for street photography in good light, it punches well above its price. I might rotate it in as a Tri-X replacement for a while and see how it holds up over many rolls.

Where to find it

Kentmere is made by Harman, the same company behind ILFORD. A roll runs around $7, which makes it one of the most affordable medium-format black-and-white options available right now. The PAN 200 is newer, released in 2025. I’d start there if you’ve never shot Kentmere before.

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