The rain finally stopped. One day out of three, the lake gave us a break, and the E100 roll — the one I’d been saving for exactly this — went into the Pentax.
Slide film is the honest film. With Portra, you can bend the exposure a stop either way and the negative forgives you. With E100, the film tells you exactly what it thought of your metering. The one dry day gave it something worth being honest about.
This is the frame that says everything about the weekend. An empty chair on the dock. Nobody in the frame at all — and that’s the point. After two days of card games and conversation under gray skies, here was the sun-lit version of the same idea: the stillness of a seat waiting for someone. The chair feels recently vacated, or patiently waiting. Either way, the relaxation is already in it. I didn’t need a person in the frame; I needed the viewer to imagine being the one sitting down.
E100 renders this with the slide-film signature: crisp highlight structure on the white slats, dark water as clean bokeh, and a saturation that isn’t loud but is simply there. Transparency film rewards a nailed exposure with depth that negative stock has to work for.
Details the eye finds on its own
A spiderweb blowing in the breeze. This is the close-up of the set — really tight depth of field, the web’s threads passing through focus in a plane thin as the silk itself. The wind was moving it constantly, which meant focusing on a millimeter-wide moving target with morning light needed just to see it. Landing this one felt like winning a small contest against physics.
And the workshoes, off for the weekend. This one took the most care with color: slide film under foliage shade leans green, and the shoes were reading cooler than they should. After a global correction pushed the sky too far toward magenta, the answer was a parametric mask — sky masked out, shoes and rail corrected on their own. The point of the frame isn’t the color, though. It’s the wear on the leather: scuffs and creases lit by raking light, labors set down for a weekend. The shoes prove the work happened. The empty dock proves it’s over.
The pair of entries
This entry and its predecessor — “Rainy Days and Card Games” — are two halves of one weekend shot on two kinds of film. Portra 160 gave the rainy days their muted warmth; E100 gave the dry day its clarity and punch. Two films, two weathers, one lake.
Camera: Pentax 645 NII
Lens: 75mm
Film: Kodak E100
Developer: Bellini 6-bath E-6 (home process)
Scanning: Epson V850 Pro, wet-mounted
Location: Lake house weekend
Captured: August 30-31, 2026