Kodak Ultramax 400 - Green and Murky

[Mondrian's Dream]

I've recently invested in a Canon EOS 50e film camera. I shot through my first roll of (fresh) Kodak Ultramax 400 on aperture priority, not using any exposure compensation, and got them developed and scanned by a third party. I'm disappointed with how my images (see below) have come out. They seem to have a definite green hue and feel overwhelmingly murky.

What has gone wrong here? Have I underexposed the images? Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[webestang64]

Your negs must be thin? Those look like scans from very underexposed film. 2-3 stops under. The lab should have compensated for that during the scan but most labs (not the one I work in) just run the film through their scanner on auto with no input from the lab tech.
You might need to have the camera meter checked. I shoot all my color (C-41) film with a tad of overexposure. 400 I rate at 320.

 

[jcdeboever]

crap scans

 

[dxqcanada]

Can you show us how the developed film looks?

 

[compur]

They do look underexposed. Was ISO manually set or set via DX?

 

[Derrel]

Looks like bad in-camera exposures to me. I suspect under-exposure in the field, either due to Exposure Compensation being set on the camera to Minus, or incorrect film ISO setting, either due to user error or forgetfulness,or perhaps some type of DX-indexing error if the camera sets the film ISO level automatically off of the DX-coded cassette's bar-code markings.

 

[480sparky]

Yep. Underexposed. A quick look at the negs should confirm this.

 

[Mondrian's Dream]

So having looked at the negatives, they definitely look thin. My camera seems to be setting the ISO correctly. Additionally, comparing the light meter to my DSLR, my 5oe seems to meter the same in even lighting and underexpose by about a stop in trickier lighting conditions (both were set to evaluative metering). There is no exposure compensation set.

Should I set the exposure compensation to overexpose by a couple of stops? Is that the easiest way around this?

 

[jcdeboever]

So having looked at the negatives, they definitely look thin. My camera seems to be setting the ISO correctly. Additionally, comparing the light meter to my DSLR, my 5oe seems to meter the same in even lighting and underexpose by about a stop in trickier lighting conditions (both were set to evaluative metering). There is no exposure compensation set.

Should I set the exposure compensation to overexpose by a couple of stops? Is that the easiest way around this?

I usually over expose, known good color film by 1 stop. 2 for suspect color film. I've never had an issue with a 2 stop increase even on known, good film. There always seems to be enough latitude on C41 color film. Here's something to consider, that film is widely avaible in CVS, Walgreens, etc, here in Michigan. Lord knows how it is stored prior to hitting the shelf. I'd probably give it a 2 stop bump in exposure

 

[cgw]

$hitty C-41 processing is easy to find now. Try another lab that seems to have some traffic. Probably the easiest variable to eliminate.

 

[bhop]

Yes, just crappy scans. Easily fixed in photoshop though. I just pressed shift+command+L (mac) and let it do auto levels..here's the result.

 

[dxqcanada]

Hmm, there appears to be detail in the negs.

 

[Mondrian's Dream]

Thank you all for your comments - I shot another roll of film with the same camera but used a different lab. The pictures came out perfect, so I'm chalking it up to a bad roll of film or suboptimal processing/scanning.