A week after shooting the first roll of Lucky Color 200, I found myself with much sunnier conditions an hour’s drive out of London.
Canterbury is one of the UK’s most popular tourist destinations, a Unesco-recognised historical city of about 50,000 people which contains ruins and remnants stretching back to Roman times. It’s also the site of Canterbury Cathedral, the spiritual home of the Church of England. Just the cathedral alone attracts a million visitors a year.
For this sunny-day trip, I’d packed a Soviet-era FED-3 rangefinder with my second roll of Lucky Color 200. The FED-3 is a no-nonsense Leica screw-mount camera with a shutter based off the Leica II of the 1930s; this FED-3 is one of the cleaner Type B models from the late 1960s or 70s.
FEDS were usually sold with a Ukrainian-made Industar lens, and this FED has an Industar-61 52/2.8, a lens that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
The sunny weather meant I could spend plenty of time nosing around Canterbury’s historic streets and making the most of the bright sunshine.
The results here are obviously much different to those captured on the Minox 35 AF in evening light, as you can see below;
Only in a few of the images can you see some of that red/purple bias creeping back in, usually in shaded areas, like in the image below:
There are three pictures in particular that leave me impressed with Lucky Color 200’s abilities:
This was the entrance to a particularly posh-looking dental practice in Canterbury. The rich red of the autumn leaves and the brickwork are accurate; the white window sills still look brightly white.
CROSS PIC
This pic features bright blue sky, a monument in half shadow and bright stone basking in the sun – a lot for both a lens and colour film to get right. I’ve left this shot pretty much unedited and am seriously impressed with the results. On top of that, this film DOES have a different colour palette to that of Kodak or Fujifilm’s colour emulsions.
The last pic here also has a nice range of colours and tones, including the textures in the panelled houses. There’s a touch of toning in the clouds and the left of the frame, but it’s not over the top. (Remember, like all of the images in these Lucky Color posts, these images have had no colour correction.)
When the weather starts to improve next year, I’m tempted to see how Lucky Color 200 copes with spring colours. A go-to colour film for those on a budget might just have arrived.
I’m a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
