Finally, I’ve found the time to start developing my slides from the German trip last year. And fortunately they look great so far. 8 rolls drying, another 4 to go. I had picked up a bunch of Kodak Elitechrome 100 off eBay. Match to a “new” Leica that I’d only put one roll of film through before leaving was taking a risk at best. (I did take my D90 too)

Initial observations are that I tend to underexposed the Leica IIIf a bit. However, when you consider that I was using a 5cm f/3.5 with frozen aperture blades and sunny-16 metering, the results are fantastic. I can’t believe just how well the low light stuff came out. Having used SLRs for nearly my whole life, anything below 1/50th was just accepted to be risky and usually a waste of money on developing costs.

Since the logic was to take a German camera on a Berlin trip, you could argue that I should have shot Agfa. There is the availability issue of course. And working though my grandfather’s Agfa slides, which have faded to various shades of brown. My mother’s 1960’s trip to France by comparison remains very nice on Kodachrome.