Holiday shots on Kodacolor II

I received two rolls of medium format film from David of Historic Connections in New South Wales, Australia. One was Kodak Verichrome Pan and turned out to be unexposed. The second is this film.

Kodacolor II was the first Kodak film to use now common C-41 process. It was introduced in 1972 as 110 type cartridge. The roll films were released in 1974 in the USA and 1975 in the UK. It was produced for a short period of time before Kodacolor VR100 superceeded it in 1983. The film was rated 100 ISO.

This roll was developed in Tetenal Colortec C-41 chemistry following the standard procedures. The negatives were digitised with a DSLR camera and converted to positive images in Darktable using the negadoctor plugin. No additional corrections were made to keep the colours close to the original. There was a bit of magenta cast towards the centre of each frame which was mostly removed by the software. The images are 6x9 cm and only six out of eight frames were exposed.

David told me that the camera is a Kodak folder, likely from the UK. The framing on the portraits is a bit off with more space left towards the top in landscape orientation or to the right of the frame in portrats. This is common in folding cameras where paralax error becomes evident in close-up shots. The scenery is typical to Australia. The magnolia tree and rhododendrons seen in one of the pictures are wide-spread over the Eastern Cost and in Tasmania. They are in full bloom in late winter and spring.

The images survived remarkably well provided the film was sitting undeveloped for almost fourty years. It would be interesting to compare this negative with another Kodacolor II that was processed soon after it was exposed.