By Jupiter! Portrait shoot on ADOX Color Mission 200 film


What a time to be alive! A BRAND NEW film stock just released by ADOX called Color Mission 200. I was very fortunate to be able to grab two rolls via someone on a fb group I’m part of who had the great foresight to buy a whole stack of these and then sell them on at cost price to fellow film addicts! Thank you kind sir! Without your quick thinking (and bulk purchasing) I’d have missed out on this film stock - which if you can’t be bothered to read any further I flipping LOVE! What a surprise - a film stock that he loves, shock horror, stop press etc etc.

It’s been a while since I blogged as I’ve been super busy with other things but I’ve got a ton of stuff to share with you all and what better way to kick things off than taking ADOX Color Mission 200 film for a spin. A big thank you to Danni for modelling on this shoot - it’s always great fun shooting together!

A few words about the kit before diving into the images - I’ve been shooting loads with my Nikon F2 recently so I decided it was high time that my Pentax Spotmatic F come out to play. I took my ARAX CM along too but that’s a blog for another day!

The Spotmatic is such a great camera- I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a reasonably priced and solidly built M42 camera. Lenswise it was an all Jupiter affair (see what I did with the title eh? By Jupiter I said….By Jupiter…oh forget it).

I only took the silver spotmatic F on the shoot but you can see the lenses mounted side by side below - the Jupiter 9 is really compact almost the size of a 50mm and the 135 is likewise quite a compact design.

Spot the multi coated lens or what?!! :)

The Jupiter 9 85mm f2 is a lens which I’ve owned for a while now but only shot with once (as it happens on another shoot with Danni HERE) I also took along a brand new to me Jupiter 11 135mm f4. I’ll share the images in the order I shot them - Jupiter 9 first then the Jupiter 11.

I was really keen to shoot the Jupiter 9 wide open at f2 - not something I often do TBH, but with these old soviet lenses that’s often where there unique characteristics are most pronounced.

I love the dreamy glow that the Jupiter 9 creates in the shot above, it’s the single coated version and handled the backlighting really well (always use a lens hood peeps)!

Love the wide open soft dreamy effect of this lens! Well chat about the film at the end but so far so great I reckon! Now let’s take a look at some of the Jupiter 11 shots.

I really love the Jupiter 11 too - it’s an f4 max aperture and I shot this wide open too. Being an f4 lens gives you enough depth of field to ensure a sharp portrait and look at those blurry backgrounds too - lovely!

OK so let’s take a totally subjective and unscientific approach to thinking about the film: my first flush response was that it really reminds me of Kodak Pro Image 100 which I’ve shot before with Danni (again) a couple of years ago HERE I think the texture and tonality are very similar, colour wise ADOX tends a little more towards the red where as Pro Image is more towards green so that’s something to keep in mind.

This shoot had lots and lots of natural sunlight as you can see - I love the contrast and just overall feel of the images, really lovely stuff. Part of me would be tempted to over expose my next roll (yes I have another) at 100 and see how it performs but I like the punchy colours and contrast of this roll so much that I’m not sure, maybe I’ll just shoot it at 200.

Big thanks to Exposure Film Lab my go to people for colour film dev and scanning!

This film has bags of character and a lovely classic feel to it - absolutely love the results and it’s so exciting to see a brand new film coming to market! Well done to the folks at ADOX!