Film Review: Kodak Vision3 – 250D (65mm Movie Stock)

 

Personal Note

I’ve really wanted to start focusing on some film reviews and share my notes with the film that I’ve worked with or at least tried at least once or twice. Granted that some film is harder to find (being discontinued), It would be difficult to give a film a good unbias review; however, it’s something to log and keep track for any fellow film photographer who enjoys the experimental process of analog film photography.

Review

Nonetheless, today I want to share my thoughts with Kodak Vision3 250D film, as it’s one of my favorite color stock film, as well as the 200T brother film too. Kodak quotes:

The Vision3 250D film offers outstanding performance in the extreme of exposures, including increased highlight latitude, so you can move faster on the set and pull more detail out of the highlights in post. You’ll also see the reduced grain in the shadows, so you can push the boundaries of underexposed and still get outstanding results.

In my experience thus far, I can say that it’s indeed an outstanding daylight film. In terms of ASA, there aren’t any color stock 200 ASA film in production. Before getting my hands on this stock of film, I was using Portra 400 film, pulled to 200-250 ASA. I do have to agree that in comparison to Portra 400 pulled to 200, the Vision3 250D film does hold its grain structure very well. Also, there is more saturation punch to V3 250D film compared to the Kodak Portra lineup. I can definitely see the difference in the highlights and shadows in terms of detail and film latitude. Overall the representation of the film is really clean and wonderful to work with. The film does have a warmer feel and cleaner crispness, due to the better control in the highlights. This film would also be a joy to use if you underexpose it for portraiture work because it does give a nice look with the deeper color renditions.

Example

One roll that I love was during a test photo shoot with Nana in Ningbo Yinzhou Park, China. I’ve used my Rolleiflex 2.8F Planar during that time and photographed roughly from early afternoon to Sunset. You can notice that the shadows can have a cool blue tint and the mid-tones can have a warmer yellow tint to it. Overall, the contrast of the color gives it a very pleasing feel to it. You can also notice this easily with the frames that were shot within the forest. The sunset enhanced the warmer colors, as well as the lesser light of the forest shadows.

This roll was developed with the ECN-2 developer, the recommended developer to use for movie stock film. It was self-developed and scanned with a Hasselblad Flextight X5 scanner.

More examples will come soon with the V3 250D, as well as the other Vision 3 series films.

 




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