Summer flowers on Kodak Ektachrome E100G

For my birthday this year my mom bought me a bunch of new flowering plants for my front garden. She did most of the work planting them, too. What a nice gift!

Daisies

I so enjoy walking through my garden for a minute before I get in the car to go to work. I pull off a few dead flowers, take in the scents of the flowers that have them, and generally enjoy a peaceful moment before getting busy.

More pink phlox

Shortly after all the new plants were in the ground and had gotten happy in their new surroundings, I loaded some E100G slide film into my Yashica-D and shot the whole roll in ten minutes. These, by the way, are the same lilies I featured on Monday.

Yellow and purple lilies

These aren’t the finest photographs I’ve ever taken, but I had so much fun shooting them. I love my Yashica-D. It just feels so good and right in my hands. Everything about the camera feels solid, precise, and elegant.

Lobelia

Mom and I — well, mostly Mom — moved a bunch of my existing plants to better locations. These coneflowers and yellow daisies came from Mom’s garden in South Bend before she moved here. They grew too tall where I had them before, so into the main front bed they went where they can be as tall as they want to be.

Coneflowers and yellow daisies

I bought these hosta at Wal-Mart a couple years ago. My next-door neighbor would probably be miffed if he knew, as he’s a master hosta grower and keeps offering me plants from his prodigious growings, which I usually decline. His timing is always terrible — when he offers, it never fails that I’m up to my armpits in alligators and don’t have time to plant anything.

Hosta

Most years I buy a flowering plant in a pot for my front stoop. This year, it was purple petunias. Purple is my favorite color. Kudos to Kodak E100G for rendering the color right. So many films miss the boat on purple.

Potted petunias

Here’s my favorite shot from the roll. It’s not square because I flubbed up the winding a little bit at the beginning of the roll, and it resulted in the last frame being cut off. I cropped it to the usable part of the image.

Yellow and purple lilies, redux

Comments

13 responses to “Summer flowers on Kodak Ektachrome E100G”

  1. J P Cavanaugh Avatar

    My mother was never much of a gardener, but her aunt was. Aunt Alma gave mom some daisies, which we planted behind the house. The daisies thrived there, and they were always my favorites as a kid, maybe because they were one of very few flowers I could identify on sight. I had not thought of them in years!

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I was that way with tulips. Somebody had a big clump of them in their front yard on my walk to school. I knew what they were and so therefore I was fascinated by them. Other flowers were indistinguishable to me back then.

  2. davidvanilla Avatar

    Walking among such beauty early in the morning has to be a soothing way to start a day. Thanks for taking us along.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      You’re welcome!

  3. Joe shoots resurrected cameras Avatar

    Wow, the colors! I wish I had been able to shoot some of this before it was gone.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      This was all right outside my front door, so it was easy to sneak the pics in.

  4. Marcus Avatar

    E100G was my favourite film to use in the Contax 645 before it (the film) became extinct. Did you have a roll in your freezer? Now I use Provia 100F in the medium format camera and the cheaper Agfa CT100 for 35mm. Both are good.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I bought a 5 pack when I discovered that Kodak had discontinued the film, and am slowly shooting it. I think I have two rolls left, both in the fridge. Since then I discovered I like Ektar 100 so much that I’m unlikely to shoot much slide film after my E100G is gone. Maybe an occasional roll of Velvia 50 for things that I want to be hyper-saturated.

      1. Marcus Avatar

        Kodak’s Portra is very nice, though a bit different than the E100G. It has fine grain and natural colour. Ektar is very saturated but I can’t seem to get decent results from it. I think it needs very precise exposure.

        1. Jim Grey Avatar

          I’ve had the opposite experience with Ektar: I find it has good latitude. I got some great, well-exposed shots on Ektar using a 100-year-old box Brownie! See it here: http://blog.jimgrey.net/2014/08/18/kodak-no-2-brownie-model-d/

          1. Marcus Avatar

            Those are great results from the film and that 100 year old camera. Maybe I’ll try another roll of Ektar later but I’ve mostly given up on negative film because most labs here see film as an annoyance that takes up time that could be spent doing work that is more profitable like digital prints.

  5. Khürt Williams Avatar

    Last week I shot my first roll of E100 in over 30 years. Fingers crossed.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Good luck!

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