Yashica Samurai with Agfa Ultra 100
The Yashica Samurai is a half frame camera which is great because it allows you to get twice the number of images from a roll of film. And that matters when the outdated film is rare like this roll of Agfa Ultra 100 a friend Duncan kindly gave me to shoot. Agfa Ultra was described as a saturated film with punchy contrast but after being outdated for a few years it seems to have mellowed out to a pastel pallet and much lower contrast. The sort of contrast like that between a large shrimp and a prawn they look the same to me and are both delicious. Introduced in 2003 (the same year digital cameras first out sold film cameras) It had a brief existence.
The above spectral graph is an indication of how Ultra compares to Kodak Eltar 100 a film it is often compared to. One interesting thing you can see is that the green sensitive layers of the Agfa Ultra are relatively insensitive to blue light compared to many other films including Ektar. (Its the green line bellow 500nm that I’m talking about). Intuitively this would suggest that it would reproduce clean deep blue skies better. Agfa claimed that the colour sensitivity of Ultra and Vista more closely matched human colour perception and referred to it as ‘EYE VISION technology” This is a good time to remember that film is really a 3 dimensional capture medium, while it may be very thin it is comprised of somewhere around 7 layers on top of the substrate that light must pass through and be filtered and absorbed by. Film is amazing stuff!
One thing about one film: Agfa claimed an exposure latitude of -2 to +3EV for Ultra
Get ready for a wack of images because I squeezed 70 shots on the roll because of the Samurai being half frame. (Best viewed in full screen)