Retrochrome 400 - First Roll
My impressions from my first roll of FPP Retrochrome 400, sharing the whole roll
I recently bought 11 rolls of FPP Retrochrome from someone I follow on Instagram. Seemed like a good deal for a film stock that is no longer available and I’ve never shot before. This is likely the only time I’ll ever get my hands on this government grade expired ektachrome. I’m sharing every shot from my first roll with you here.
I took this roll out with me on a rare summer climbing day at Elephant Rocks. Rare because it was something like mid 70s in July, we never get that. Unfortunately it was wet, so we couldn’t get much climbing done, but I did manage to finish off the roll of 24 exposures while we were out for the day.
The first couple of shots came with quite a bit of color shift and the slides were very thin. These had some post-work done by the local lab to get something decent out of them, but I like the look.
The rest of the roll lost a lot that significant color shift and looked more like normal film. However there is definitely still some expired vibes in there.
The cloudy day made for even lighting and it was a great to see how this film holds up in even lighting. I did try to play around with some higher contrast scenes to see how it would handle them and it seemed to do ok. Next time out I think I’ll try and get out on a sunnier day, and in a camera with more control so that I can see what this film is still capable of producing.
After a good morning hanging out at Elephant Rocks we stopped by Lady Queene for a burger and a shake before making the voyage home and I snapped the last two frames of the roll. It’s nice to have slide film that’s 400 speed so that I can shoot it in a variety of conditions in the XA.
Thanks for reading. I haven’t been out shooting too much this summer. And when I have it’s been to work on some things for a longer term project that I’m hoping I’ll be sharing here soon. Let me know your favorite shot from this roll, or if you have any other dead film stocks you love to shoot!