Kodak Ektachrome - First Impressions
I bought one singular roll of Ektachrome in early 2025, and it sat in my fridge untouched until I finally decided to shoot it a few weeks ago (February ‘26). Why, you may ask? Well, I was scared to shoot it.
Shot on Leica M6 + Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm F/2.5
A bit of context.
So like I said, this roll of Ektachrome (also called E100) was sitting in my fridge for just shy of a year (I’m approximating — but it’s somewhere around there). Ektachrome is a pretty expensive ($22/roll) but iconic slide film (E-6 process) that has been around since 1946, and was basically a replacement for Kodak’s famous “Kodachrome” stock. Ektachrome is a 100 speed film known for its high contrast and distinctive punchy, cool tones. The thing is, it’s pretty limited in how you can use it due to its poor latitude, so you have to be very accurate when you meter because if you expose it wrong, you likely won’t be able to recover it — which can be a bit daunting since it costs so much.
I’ve seen a ton of great work shot using this stock and I’ve always been extremely tempted to try it out for myself since I felt like it would really fit my style, but for the reasons I mentioned above, I never really found the “right” time to shoot it. I knew I needed a day with a lot of light, but I always ended up resorting to other stocks when it came time to shoot. So a few weeks ago, when I was deciding what roll to shoot, I finally decided to rip the bandaid off.
Shooting the roll.
The first day I went out to shoot was a sunny day in Brooklyn, but I only ended up taking a few boring photos and then the next time I went out to shoot, it was an overcast day in Chinatown during the Lunar New Year celebrations. So I basically waited all that time just to shoot 80% of the roll in conditions I didn’t really want, but I guess it was good to see results from two different types of light.
I metered the film at box speed and tried to be as accurate as I could for all the shots, but when I was unsure, I leaned a bit towards overexposure. It was much easier to meter when I was in Williamsburg given the sunny weather and more open space, but shooting in Chinatown was a bit more challenging as I was moving between areas where the available light was changing quite frequently.
When it came to the photos I chose to shoot, I didn’t try to shoot anything different than I normally would. I didn’t want to fully cater the images to the stock, if that makes sense. I shot what I normally would if I was shooting a stock like Portra 400 or Cinestill 800T.
The results.
None of the photos I took are worth writing home about, but that’s besides the point. All the photos were taken on my Leica M6 and Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm F/2.5.
The first few shots in Williamsburg came out pretty good in terms of exposure, but were pretty boring overall. Since only a small portion of the roll was shot in sunny conditions, I think it might be worth it to dedicate a full roll to a sunny day.
On the following day in Chinatown, there was a point where things were so hectic and I was shooting very fast and I forgot to adjust the settings on the camera, so I ended up overexposing a handful of shots that I couldn’t really recover. On other stocks, I probably would’ve been able to get the images to a usable look, but that wasn’t the case with this one.
Overall, the images have a pretty significant cooler blue/green tint, especially the ones that were taken in the darker shadow areas in Chinatown. Now if you know me, you’d know I don’t mind cooler-leaning stocks, but personally I really like how some of these came out and it reminds me of some of my favorite photos that were shot on Kodachrome. I tried not to mess with the overall structure and true look of the stock in Lightroom because that wouldn’t exactly be a good representation of the stock, but if I wanted to, I could tweak the tone curves and temperature to remove a bit of that cooler look. But overall, I don’t mind it. There were some photos that I think looked really cool, and there were others that were a bit sickly-looking. However, I do really like how the reds pop in some of the images.
The first gallery of examples are the “usable” images, and the second gallery are the ones that were overexposed beyond the point of recovery.
Conclusion.
Would I shoot it again? Sure, but very sparingly.
The only reasons I probably won’t shoot it very often is because I don’t love shooting 100 speed films, and I also can’t see myself spending $22 on a roll regularly. However, I could definitely see some cases where I’ll buy a roll here and there for certain days and projects but it won’t be a part of the regular rotation. If it was closer to like $15/roll, I’d definitely be more inclined to shoot it, but that’s a pipe dream.
It’s a really cool stock that is reminiscent of the iconic Kodachrome so I’m sure it has a soft spot in a lot of people’s hearts. I probably will shoot some more rolls in the future, but falling in love with this stock would be a bad financial mistake. I doubt that’ll happen though.