It turns out that Hasselblad XPans and salt water don’t mix very well. The following is the result of a major brain fade moment, where I left my XPan outside (in an inflatable dinghy) on the deck of a yacht in force 7 (8?) seas in the Arctic.

It is effectively unrepairable.  Maybe if I’d opened it up and immediately and washed it in fresh water I might have been able to save it, but, well, I didn’t.  Hopefully the insurance will cover it.

Photo credit, along with many thanks for rapid intervention and support, to Marco Baldin at Leica Switzerland.

Well, I’m off to Svalbard for a few weeks.  I spent ages agonising over what film to take… a totally archaic process, but after being prompted by Tim Parkin, I eventually decided to make a radical (for me) switch and go for Kodak Ektachrome 100G.  Along with a few rolls of Provia 100X for backup. 

All I need now is to find something to point the camera at!

Recently Lasersoft added support for Ektar 100 to their NegaFix tool for inverting negative scans. I’d been wanting to try out this film for a while now, and in fact I had a few rolls sitting ready. So I pulled my Ricoh GR-1v out of retirement and tried it out.

I scanned the film in the CanoScan 9000F, using SilverFast AI with SRDi dust and scratch removal activated, and just went for the default settings for Ektar 100.

The shot was quite tricky with mixed lighting, but Silverfast pretty much nailed it. The scan is very close to the 1-hour photolab print. Certainly there’s plenty more that could be done, but I was more interested in where the baseline was. Having tried to scan various other negative films last year, I wasn’t expecting much. But I was pleasantly surprised.

The resolution of Ektar 100 is quite astonishing, and if I were to switch to negative film, this would be the one.  However, I’m going to stick with slide film.  It has its own drawbacks, but none of the interpretation issues of negative film, or indeed the lack of immediacy.