Top 3 Color Films
for Half Frame

This is my favorite color half frame film without any question. Ultra fine grain, beautiful colors and saturation matched only in the slide film realm — but Ektar is much more forgiving than slide film. If I had to pick a desert island film, this would be it.

For my style of shooting — mostly bright sunlight landscape and street — Ektar is it. The colors are big and bold, but still retain an analog feel. One of the best things about using a high-quality film like Ektar is that the scans or prints are very difficult to distinguish from full frame 35mm unless you blow them up really big.

I spent all summer walking around with Ektar loaded in my Yashica Samurai, working on a big personal project. The following images were shot on a Canon Demi along the Historic US Highway 395.

This is a lot of people's favorite film in any format, and with good reason. It is forgiving as heck, has nice fine grain for ISO 400, and has a beautiful muted color palette that happens to be very much in right now. Half the filter presets floating around in the digital world are meant to emulate Portra in some respect.

The consistency of results is the best thing and simultaneously the worst thing about this film. You always get good to great results, but you never get any fun surprises or wild contrast. That being said I still turn to this film fairly often, especially when I want a consistent look across a series I am working on. If I was planning to shoot portraits or people, this is the clear choice.

This one is kind of a toss-up. We all have our favorite consumer-grade films and forever Fuji Superia 400 was mine. I always overexposed a stop or two and the results always came out excellent. It has a little grain which becomes fairly noticeable on half frame but all in all the overall aesthetic is tough to beat for the price.

This past summer I started messing around with Fuji C200 and found it equally pleasing in a slightly different way. Surprisingly the grain is about the same as Superia (possibly larger) and the tones are a bit cooler — but this is an excellent consumer-grade film for any use, especially half frame.