Kodak Aerochrome 2448

Common confusion: Aerochrome 2448 is not the infrared stock most people mean when they say Aerochrome. The famous false-color infrared with the pink foliage is the 2443 / 1443 family. The 2448 is the natural-color reversal aerial mapping film, an Ektachrome variant on Estar polyester base, built for low and medium altitude survey work where accurate color matters and infrared discrimination does not.

Kodak made the 2448 family for the US Geological Survey, civilian mapping contractors, and photo-recon units that wanted color slides rather than false-color analysis. The Estar base is the key engineering detail. Polyester stays flat over long unspooled runs and survives the temperature shifts of an unpressurized camera bay at altitude. A roll could be 250 feet wound on a 200-foot spool because the base is thinner than acetate. None of that matters in a still camera. It matters when a mapping aircraft is running a strip at 1/500 over an entire watershed.

Color rendering is honest and clean compared with general-purpose Ektachrome of the same era, with a cool bias appropriate to subjects shot through atmospheric haze. Reds stay red. Greens read as chlorophyll rather than the magenta of the 2443 cousin. Against Ektachrome 64 Professional shot on the ground, 2448 has lower saturation and a longer scale, consequences of tuning for haze penetration over studio fidelity.

If you find a roll loaded into a 35mm cartridge by a surplus reseller, treat it as expired EA-5 stock and run it through E-6, which is the closest still-available process. The film was almost never sold for handheld use; what is on the market is old, often opened, sometimes respooled from aerial reels. Bracket. Expect a magenta or yellow cast that will not respond well to correction.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second metered reading lands at about 35 seconds at the negative. For the original users, shooting at 1/500 from a Fairchild mount over Nevada, reciprocity never came up. The bigger problem now is what has happened to the dyes in twenty years.