I use neither Ultra or Royal... the main Kodak film I use is the T400CN chromogenic black & white film which uses the standard C-41 colour process for development. Cheaper processing and faster as well! I quite like the grains on this as I feel them to be finer than the normal B&W 400 film. My main color option is actually Fuji 100F and 400 Provia (slides). I rarely use colour film except for the occasional Kodak Gold 200 from my local camera shop.
I normally use either centre-weighted or spot metering (centre-weighted only on the F3) and take my readings off the shadows and highlights. I then take the average reading from this and compensate accordingly (up to 1-stop max) depending on the percentage of shadow to highlights in the actual composition. I rarely use matrix-metering, even in the F5 unless I'm really lazy or when I pass the camera over to my wife for "snap-shots" (Matrix-metering and Program mode). Flash?!? on 400 film?!? :bigeyes:
As for the pics on my site, these were scanned on the film scanner in colour-mode and re-converted into B&W again. The direct B&W scanning method doesn't give me the option to use the ICE function for dust removal when scanning.
On the colour pics, you have to realise that all the images have been re-sized and compressed to 450 pixels along the longest edge and under 50~70 kbytes file size to ease download times and save on web space. You can't really expect vibrant colours under these parameters, right? If you really want to have good saturated colours, switch to slides (Fuji Provia 100F or Velvia 50)... you won't want to use film after that!