5 frames with Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400

After quite a long period of shooting exclusively black & white film, I have started to try and revive my former interest in colour photography. Mind you, me not shooting colour film in the last years was not related to cost, or availability, but to the hardships of my own C41 processing. Somewhere in the late 2000s I stopped developing my own colour stuff mainly because the chemicals temperature was so difficult to keep. I had my fair share of failures and successes both, so at the time I decided to go with bw films only. That I could do.

From the days of yore, I still have a good number of colour rolls, stashed away. Given the cost for the colour film these days, I will not probably get more than a brick or two every now and then. I recently purchased some 20 Fuji and Kodak 200 colour film. However, my preferred ones (Ektar, Agfa Pro 160, Portra 160 and 400) are asking for quite dear prices and it’s kind a hard to pay up to 25 euros (and more) for a roll of these, unless some colour film project comes along.

This roll of Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400 is what remained from my last 10 x brick bought in 2014. As I do not shoot a lot of 400 film, I kept it in order to cut 4 x Minox size film out of it. Never happened, so I decided to use it in an Olympus XA2, which is by the way an excellent compact camera, with a razor-sharp Zuiko lens.

One may say it was designed with street photography in mind, and indeed it delivers, especially when loaded with fast film. And given the reopening of my local lab for colour business, I decided that I would go and shoot the leftovers of colour films that I still have. There’s no better time like present time, right?

The main photograph shows the Imperial Palace (or Buda Castle), Budapest, handheld shot from a cruise boat.

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