400 Slide or Negative for printing.

I had a very good experience with Rollei Digibase, both slide and print, but it is only 200 ISO and I think it is too slow for your application. It has a very accurate color reproduction (not the screaming colors that seem to be of fashion nowadays) and a very good tonal range, preserving details in higlights and shadows and making the scanning job much easier.

 

Slide is unlikely to be your best option for this particular purpose, I would go to that in more controlled lighting conditions. Having said that, if I were to attempt birds with slide, I think I'd go to astia 100f and provia 400x. But overall, most of the birds I encounter are in spotty and quickly changing light conditions and that makes slide much less favourable than print IMO.

Besides portra, try fuji pro h (at 320) and pro z (at ~600).

And get a faster lens A slow zoom is going to limit you severely when it comes to birding, and it's not really something you want to fight by going to higher ISO film. If you can get yourself into the range of the 160 print films....

 

I reccomend getting some Ektachrome or Elite Chrome 200 and having it push processed to 400. I just did it to 800 with great results!

 

If you are looking for printing as your final result, I recommend a negative film. High-speed negative films usually have finer grain than high-speed positive film.

 

I find the results of most consumer color negative films around that speed to be very good (relatively speaking.) I've enlarged well exposed Kodak super duper plus awesome whatever 400 speed film to 8x10 with good results.

I just tried my first 11x14 color print. Awesome. The Ektar stuff in 35mm gives me a practically grainless image at that size. But I don't think any 400 speed film is going to do that. Honestly and truthfully, this is the line of work that went to digital because of the speed advantage. You'll need a pro zoom to do this acceptably.

 

If you're scanning and printing I've had good results with both film types, if you're sending out a slide or neg to be printed go for slide, as you'll get more accurate colours. Neg printers will have to use their own interpretation for colour.

If accurate exposure may be a problem use neg, you can set the camera to 800 iso without special processing and still get a decent result.

If I didn't print my own negatives I'd use slide, as I assume you want punchy accurate colours, slide has an advantage here in my experience at least.