#2.5 [Pollux] Compact 28 + Ultramax

When I purchased two Olympus XA for a bargain last week (52rolls is to blame), the seller showed me a compact flash point & shoot by Nikon with a 28mm lens. The price for the AF 600 was less than 3 rolls of Tri-X, so I took it with me and got me a roll of Ultramax.

The cam is cute, but you should better be shooting in the daylight, my party picts with the built in flash are not going to be shown here due to quality issues of the photographs (and I spare you another film of this obsessive week). I’ll leave it at that: They do not resemble the look made famous by Terry Richardson.

The outdoor results look fine, but be warned not to switch on the “Panoramic”-function of the AF 600 – that’s just masking the film with two extra horizontal borders like watching a cinemascope film on a TV screen.

I will come back to this cam for sure, because j’adore le Grand Angle, as they say in Paris and it is as small as a pack of cigarettes.

#3 – The first automatic machine I’ve seen which sells inner tubes for bicycles.

Besides, I really like Kodak Ultramax. I love Portra, but Ultramax is nice and has it’s consumer-friendly whoomp in terms of saturation.

Is it correct that in the US a roll of Ultramax is just two dollars? (Update: No, a roll for 36 frames is about 3.70 Dollars) Is it sold there as an ordinary, generic film in drugstores? If so, I envy the situation there. To my taste, in Berlin it’s not cheap enough – 4 Euros for a roll of 24 shots make me choose a roll of Portra instead. Give me Ultramax for 3 Euros /36 pictures and I am fine. But then again: in Germany you don’t find Portra, Velvia, 400H and the like in drugstores.

Logfile: I’m preparing for springtime already and ordered a set of five rolls of Fujifilm Reala 100 in 120 format. Really excited about that and can’t wait to see them performing with some adequate lenses.

Pollux on 52rolls:

28 thoughts on “#2.5 [Pollux] Compact 28 + Ultramax”

I only shot a roll or two in my AF600 before selling it again, but it was a nice camera!

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Pollux says:

January 21, 2016 at 17:28

Couldn’t go wrong for this price. Cheaper than two rolls of Cinestill 800T.

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- urbanhafner says:
  
  January 21, 2016 at 18:09
  
  That is true. For some reason they’re quite expensive on eBay these days.
  
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28 on a point and shoot is wonderful! There aren’t enough wide angle point and shoots – or even wide angle zooms. It seems everyone wanted to zoom closer from 35mm, not farther out. The shots really make use of that wide angle, too, great!

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Pollux says:

January 21, 2016 at 17:47

Merci beaucoup, Actually I’m really enjoying some wide angle lenses, so it was an easy decision to go for it.

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That yellow looks great in the Ultramax. I might have to shoot a roll or two in the next couple of weeks.

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Pollux says:

January 21, 2016 at 19:57

So I should tell you about my scanning workflow first: I scan the negatives as positive 16-bit files (my software Silverfast calls them RAW-files) and then I invert them with a software called Colorperfect, which is very tricky, because you can adjust many parameters.

I don’t have any experience with color in the wet lab, I only print Black and White on Baryta and PE paper. But I let a big lab develop the negatives for a very cheap price and scan them at home with a film scanner. For around three or four Euros, I get a roll of film processed and printed in 10×15 cm.

So looking at the prints (which I like) and comparing them to my first scan results, I decided I wanted to copy the color palette of the print. I managed to do this with Photoshop by adding more shadows and tuning the dark blues, which went out of control in my scans.

This is how I did it in Photoshop: copy of the picture and blending them in the layer mode “soft light” (around 20-30 %). That emulates a specific gradation of the paper. The colors shouldn’t saturate too much. Then checking the dark blues which had a tendency towards purple. After that the scans looked like the prints.

The grey point was difficult to find sometimes, but as it is, the whole workflow only makes you happy if there is enough time for a single picture.

I read a book once by an US wedding photographer named John Canlas (title: ‘Film is not dead’). He said the reason why he is mainly working with analog cams is that he doesn’t need post processing the pictures when they come from the lab. They know him there and know his taste and needs. That means he tell them to process for the skin tones and let all the rest follow.

For color, I’d like to work with a lab like that to, but due to budget issues I can’t afford something like this for my personal work. If someone hires me it’s another story.

Finally: I checked the current prize for Ultramax. Around 3,70 Dollars for a roll with 36 picts in 135 format is fair, but not extraordinary cheap, but considerably cheaper than a roll of Portra, which is more than seven Dollars at B&H and other sellers. My favorite generic film sold out in March 2015: dm200 Paradies, which was for three rolls only for 3.45 Euros (3,71 Dollars) – one roll for 1.15 Euro or 1.25 US-Dollar.

When the german drugstore market stopped producing the re-labeled film, I went shopping to buy as much as I could for 100 Euros. Presumably I will post a lot of examples with it. Especially in late spring, summer and autumn.

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