Expired Portra 160 NC // Nikon fg
Just got some scans back from the lab. This roll was an expired roll of Portra 160NC that I shot in my Nikon FG with a 50mm and 28mm lens.
And, boy oh boy, do I have some THOUGHTS.
First up, you should go check out my blog about the test roll of this expired film: https://www.jtimpko.com/blog/blog-post-title-one-zk7fa
Now, when comparing those photos to these new ones, we see some MAJOR differences.
I was shooting this whole roll at 80ISO, since that worked out so well last time. Let’s see the photos already.
So these photos really helped solidify something to me; i need to get rid of my Nikon FG. These photos are so much grainier, muddier, and just overall softer than photos i take in other cameras. The first roll of 160NC i shot was in my Canon FTb QL. The quality is night and day to me.
If you zoom in, the photo on the right has a significant amount of grain in the shadows. It looks muddy. I think i can chalk this up (until proven otherwise) to the camera and not the film. I mentioned it in my most recent video that it seems unlikely that I grabbed the only well-maintained role in the bag in my first go. Chances are this role that I put through my Nikon was not metered properly using the cameras internal meter. It seems like the camera deliberately under exposed a lot of my images not by a lot but by enough that it affected the overall quality. Also, I should mention that a lot of the time when shooting this role I was shooting in pretty overcast conditions. The sun was very rarely out, and the sky was completely gray. Going back to that under exposure point that I was making let's take a look at these two photos. The one on the left was taken with Kodak Gold 200 in my Mamiya RB 67. The one on the right was taken on Portra 160 NC with the Nikon. They were taken at the same time and it appears that the Nikon did not meter correctly because what we see on the left is what we should be seeing on the right.
Once again, I'm really not sure what happened with the Kodak rule in the Nikon. It was foggy this day, but it was not dark, so I'm not sure why the Nikon FG metered incorrectly. I had the camera set to aperture priority. I don't know what my exact settings were, but I do know that I expected more. Thank God that I had that roll of Kodak in the RB 67 because otherwise I'd be super upset that I didn't get a solid photo of this house something I was very excited to see when I drove past. (even that one is a bit shoddy, but not as bad the Nikon one.)
Anyway, here are my favorites from the roll. These are “usable” but far from work that will make the overall portfolio, most likely.
