Portra 160

Before starting this post, one note going forward about these “roll” posts. I’ll be displaying significantly larger images starting from this post. These can be around 20MB so the image may take significantly longer to load. This is expected. I may in the future change how this works a bit but for now these posts will take a long time to load.

The first roll of this set is the Portra 160. At first blush, I thought this was my favorite roll of the 3 and had the best pictures. It also spanned the longest period of time. The first few pictures were taken in Austin at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center back on April 4, with the majority of the pictures taken on April 10th.

In terms of characteristics, this film kind of has it all. It has deep, rich colors that don’t feel oversaturated. It has a really small grain that makes the pictures really sharp. It handles contrast really well. In a lot of ways, it’s a dream to shoot. Unless I made mistakes, which I’ll get into, every picture really turned out the way I wanted it to.

This roll is pretty overrepresented by landscape pictures. I may have alluded to it in a previous post, but I really don’t know quite what to do with landscapes. Space can be hard to work with because you tend to want sharp pictures through the frame. Time and timing are often not the most applicable because often times there’s not a whole lot happening in front of you. Even when there is, it can be far away and small which makes it hard to call to attention. Additionally, light isn’t always a powerful asset. Especially on that Sunday, the 10th, it was pretty cloudy for much of the afternoon while I was at Palo Duro. Obviously that made the hiking a lot nicer, but in terms of usable effects, it was difficult for me.

Even so, I like how a lot of these pictures turned out. Even inside the landscapes there are a few different images represented. I also learned a bit more about my camera and how its meter operates. While that definitely led to a dead picture here or there, especially that one in the bottom left, that knowledge will be really helpful in the future.

In terms of numbers, there were 36 pictures taken on this roll which is pretty standard. Of them I labelled 20 as “worse” and 16 as “better”. As a result, this roll looks to be the best of the 3 I’ve talked about so far. Additionally, some of these are labelled as “worse” because they’re not quite what I wanted or are largely duplicates so maybe it’s more generous to say 18/18 instead of 20/16.

Even so, I don’t necessarily view this as an upgrade to the previous rolls. I think that a lot of the pictures I took here are a bit safer and easier to both conceive and take. In a lot of ways, these pictures are really safe and I feel that their impact is significantly lacking in comparison. While I really like some of the pictures, there are few that really stand out.

Before labelling into “worse” and “better”, I actually rate more fine grained. This tends to be along the lines of “bad”, “ok”, “interesting”, “good”, and “great”. For both of the first two rolls I found pictures I thought were actually great. For the Lomography 400, it was the Darkbird and Mobley pictures I highlighted. For the CineStill 800T, it was the Pastel Ghost pictures I highlighted. For this roll, I’m not sure I can really point to any single picture as a great picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there are good and powerful pictures on this roll. The yellow flower picture I talked about in the Dark/Stark post might be my favorite picture on this roll. I think it provides a lot of nuance and capability to ruminate and understand. However, I just don’t feel like it accomplishes the same kind of immediately powerful effect that the pictures I mentioned above have. This isn’t a slight against the picture, it’s just not the same type and doesn’t have the same impact.

All in all, I’d love to shoot this film again but maybe with a different focus. Move away from landscapes and into a different type of focus. The one tricky thing is that since this is ISO 160 film, it won’t do great in low light, requiring significantly more light than a “faster”, higher number rated film. I’ll have to think about what I want to do with it moving forward, but it’s definitely a positive experience for me.