Necessi-T

If there is one thing I hate more than anything it is techinical difficulties that make you ultimately feel like you are a.)going crazy, or b.) a bad photographer. I ran into such a ridiculous technical difficulty the other day that had me honestly questioning everything because I shot an assignment, failed it, reshot it, and ended up with the same result as the initial, again a failure. However, I also had a sucessful image based on the same conceptualization, same lighting situation, same meter reading, and same exposure, so I was doubly frustrated.

I took the three failed images and the one good image to my instructor with a furrowed brow. Even though I asked, he could not tell me what I had done wrong on the three bad images. No matter what we discussed, despite all of the information I provided, we could not determine the cause for the faulty images. He suggested that I take the images to the camera store where I had bought the film and had it processed to see if they could determine the problem.

The guy at the camera store couldn't tell me what was different. The intial thought was that it was a bad batch of film, though unlikely because the same batch had been sold to dozens of other students and successfully used, to their knowledge. Perhaps I had mistreated the film? No. I am exceptionally careful with my tools. All of my tools. He called another employee over. A guy who specializes in E6 processing. He was the first of all of us to notice that the film was a different film for the good image and the bad images, though he didn't know what the second film was. He went to the computer and looked up the other film, coming back to tell me that it was EI 100 Ektachrome, while the good was EI 64T, Tungsten balanced film. I explained that logically it didn't make sense. He thought about it for a second and went back to the computer, returning a second time to tell me that the first film was Kodak Ektachrome 64 and the second was Kodak Ektachrome 64T.

64 versus 64T.

The boxes are identical, save for the blue T after the 64 on the one. The exposure reciprocity is more than three stops different and the color balance is daylight versus tungsten. No one that I spoke to had ever seen Kodak Ektachrome 64. Not my instructor when I told him, not the camera store guy or the processing specialist. It's as if this random film was misordered and handed over to me just to push my buttons. Now I always check for the T. Always, always check for the T.