@fAlex in the following I'll focus mostly on
color negative, unless indicated otherwise.
Also the cinestill kit is what i'm thinking of purchasing
Personally it's not the brand I'd put at the top of my list. If you can get something else (anything, really), I'd try that first.
Please do give color development a try; it's not particularly difficult and if you can do B&W, you can do color just as well, especially color negative.
They probably don't make it.
That's quite possible. Their chemistry also changes from time to time and very obvious flaws are sometimes corrected later on, such as their initial ferricyanide bleach for C41 now being a more usual EDTA bleach. But the way their color chemistry has been evolving does not instill much confidence. The main benefit they offer is a small price for small quantities, and that's certainly attractive. But it does appear they are cutting corners here and there to achieve this. It may be (probably is) a deliberate choice to occupy the lower tier in the market segment, but this also carries risks.
Back in the olden days folks use a water bath and a thermometer. Some kits sugested "Drift processing" where you heat the developer a couple of degrees above the rated temperature and figure that it will drift down by the end of the process.
I've done both, and still do from time to time. Both approaches work fine. The water bath method had new life breathed into it when people started using the sous vide cookers also mentioned earlier. Works great if you don't want to spend much on equipment. Just get a generic sous vide stick, some glass bottles and a plastic storage tub to fit everything in.
Do you know of anyone doing it without a sous-vide or an aquirum heater, but instead with just a water bath and adding water to keep the temperature level every few minutes? I've used this technique with stand developing with pyrocat in B&W and it worked great, but B&W is less temp sensitive so.
I've done exactly that when I started with color and it worked OK. A few notes on this:
- The bigger your water bath is, the more stable it'll be in terms of temperature. A big mass of water will retain its temperature longer.
- That's relevant because color processing temperatures are higher than B&W, and the bigger the temperature difference between your bath and your room, the quicker it'll cool down.
- Only the color developer step (and in E6, the first developer) is temperature critical. It's OK if temperature drifts a little in subsequent steps. Don't worry about it.
- With color negative, you can actually develop at a lower temperature for a longer time. Many people have produced acceptable results this way. However, for optimal results, I'd recommend sticking to official process parameters; i.e. 3m15s development time at 38C/100F for C41.
- There is a little margin for error in terms of temperature. In fact, my opinion and experience is that this margin is quite broad unless you're very exacting in your work and demand extreme consistency from one roll to the next.
Concerning how much leeway/margin for error you have, here's a practical illustration:
https://tinker.koraks.nl/photography/ginkgo-leaves-on-expired-vericolor-film/ Two sheets of film from a (near) identical exposure, but processed at different times & temperatures. Both sheets produced acceptable prints (especially given that this was decades expired color film); they were
different, for sure, but both usable. So part of the story is also about your requirements and expectations.
Having said all that - it's not particularly hard to keep a water bath at 38C for a couple of minutes as you develop your film, and a sous vide stick costs about as much as a handful of film rolls (you don't need the Cinestill one marketed for photo purposes). So why not just do it properly, especially as you start out?
as far as the question about Pushing, the limit is the risk that the three layers will "Get out of step" and give you a cross over where the correction for the highlights is 180 degrees out from the correction for the shadows.
I 'push' film quite regularly; for instance, I overdevelop my ECN2 film consistently so that the contrast gradient is sufficient for optical printing. There's actually quite a lot of leeway in this regard. You can easily overdevelop by 50% of so and still get perfectly fine prints. With scans it's even easier since you can correct crossover to a large extent and more easily than in printing.
Also any advice on push or pull processing, what its effects are?
Push processing gives a steeper contrast curves, so the negatives will have more 'punch'. To a limited extent, this can compensate for underexposure, but keep in mind that underexposure will always remain that. Deep shadows are lost, no matter how you develop your film. Sometimes that's acceptable.
Pull processing on color negative film in my experience gives lifeless negatives that look soft and anemic. Given the fact that color negative film already has massive latitude (for overexposure at least), there's also no really compelling reason to do pull processing.
Start by exposing and processing your film normally. Then experiment to taste. Anything goes.
If 200 doesn't cut it for your photography, consider the following:
- If you only scan and digitally edit, a decent scanner will eek out shadow detail and allow you to boost it in post processing in ways very difficult to achieve when optically printing. So feel free to shoot your 200 film at 400, process normally (or overdevelop by 20%) and enjoy.
- Don't expect to get much more than 400 from a 200 film regardless of what magic you throw at it. Above that, shadows will start to break down and whatever you are left with in the low values will be a grainy mess with wonky colors.
- For best results, shoot at a wider aperture or slower shutter speeds, or simply buy faster film. The bad news about that is of course that Portra 800 is gorgeous, but also handsomely expensive.
The film I've bought is kodak gold (it's cheap, if I commit I'm interested in trying slide film, ektachrome maybe?
Color negative and slides are totally different animals. Either isn't better than the other. Shoot slides if you want slides, shoot color negative if you want/need the latitude and especially if you want to make optical enlargements. If you scan, there are pros and cons to either; slides tend to scan easier in terms of color balance, but the high densities on slides are a challenge for scanners. The color negative, it's just about the opposite. However, a skilled person with a halfway decent scanner can produce excellent results from either.
Gold is a perfectly fine film; I know a successful artist who shoots all their art on Gold; she produces sometimes massive prints from 35mm negatives.
Ektachrome is also a great product, but for your low-light endeavors it's not of much use. ISO 100 isn't much if you want to shoot indoors. And slides don't have much dynamic range, which at the same time makes the results so nice and snappy (a 5-stop light range is expanded into the full contrast scale of the film), but it also means that high-contrast scenes pose a challenge. Indoor photography is often high-contrast, and this tends to be disappointing with slide film.
There's so much more, but let's keep it at this for a moment.
The shoe manufacturer's slogan applies here. Just do it.