Let's have a brief look at Agfa CT Precisa 100. Again! Back in 2015 I took some rolls of the stuff to Berlin, but I came back with one spare that has been sitting in a drawer ever since. Quasars still haunt me, but not as violently as they did in 2015. After re-reading that post I realise now that I backed the wrong horse, because the Zalgo meme didn't have legs. It was a joke as far back as 2011, when the SCP Foundation mocked it. It didn't have legs.
It seemed a shame to never use that final roll, so I took it along to Greenwich, irritatingly one week before the place was covered in photogenic snow. The roll expired in 2009, but it still worked, although I had to correct the colours with Photoshop:
Slide film doesn't age as well as negative film. With negative film you can
compensate for age by overexposing it a few stops. Negative film copes well
with overexposure. You can blast it with light and still get a usable image.
Because it has a non-linear exposure curve or something like that. I'm not a
scientist.
Look, imagine that photographic film is a pair of stones, one black, one
white. Linked together with a string. With negative film you can kick the
white stone really hard, and when you print the film you can pull the black
stone back towards you, but the white stone stays where it is because the
string stretches. Which is a good thing. With slide film you can't do that.
You can't stretch the string. When the stones age the special sauce runs out
and the string doesn't stretch.
That is why slide film doesn't age well. The stones are close together and you
can't stretch them apart and as time goes on they lose their special sauce.
What was Precisa? It was a slide film. As far as I can tell it was actually
Fuji Provia, packaged into Agfa boxes and sold at a cheaper price. Perhaps
Fuji needed to get rid of some older rolls of Provia. All gone! It's all gone.
You can only buy it on the used market, and the newest rolls expired over a
decade ago.
This is the camera I used, a Nikon F-301 from 1985. It dates from a brief
window of time when SLRs had automatic exposure and built-in motor drives but
were still manual focus. It's a lot like the Canon T-70
I wrote about in 2019.
It looks plastic, but it's actually made of metal, and it feels like a solid
chunk. It's one of a tiny handful of Nikon SLRs that could read AI-S lenses,
although the Samyang 85mm f/1.4 in the picture is standard AI.
As of 2023 Agfa still exists, but the photography part of the business is one
of those ghost brands, like Atari or Polaroid. It's just a name. Fuji
apparently still makes Provia, but the days when you could pick up Precisa for
£5 a roll are gone forever.
Colourwise Precisa is good with reds, and has a generally warm look. The roll
reminded me of one of slide film's distinctive things:
Look at the bottom-left quadrant, and notice how there's a distinctive glow
around the edges of the trees. It's not just lens flare, because some of it
extends beyond the film gate. I can't tell if it's light passing through the
celluloid and reflecting back into the film from the pressure plate, or an
artefact of the scanning process, but it looks nice and I don't mind it.
This is HNLMS Karel Doorman of the Dutch navy. Why is in London? I
have no idea.
And that's Precisa. Pre-ci-sa, not pre-ci-sia. What does the CT stand for?
Colour Transparency. It uses standard E6 development, so the few remaining
commercial film labs should have no problem developing it. Until the 1980s
Agfa had its own development process for slide film that was used by nobody
else. The idea of making people use a certain type of consumable has long been
a hallmark of the photographic industry, stretching back to the invention of
photography.
As the saying goes, "they are all equal now".
