HOW MUCH OVEREXPOSURE CAN KODAK GOLD 400 TAKE?

[FilmIs4Ever]

I was shooting a football game the past week and I gave my assistant a camera while I was up in the press box shooting motion picture. He had KODAK Gold 400 film. While I had the camera properly set for 1/500 for a second, I had a mental lapse and turned the flash on. Being the wonderful piece of equipment that it is, my camera decided to reduce the shutter speed from 1/500 of a second to 1/90 of a second, overexposing the film approximately 2 1/2 to 3 stops (I'm not sure how much the flash would lend to overexposure, but it was sunny outside, so I"ll assume that the increase in exposure due to flash was minimal). Now I have heard that film's strength is in overexposure as opposed to digital's strength is underexposure, but how much of a strength is it? Is the film going to print reasonably well from negatives overexposed three stops without special processing? I don't even know where I can get C-41 film pulled, and I'm not too sure that I want to because I have about 5 pictures at the beginning of the roll that were exposed correctly. Am I okay, or am I going to have to sacrifice proper exposure of those frames and get the film specially pull-processed to salvage the other 19 frames? Thanks for all of your time and assistance everyone.

Regards.
~Karl Borowski

 

[Will S]

From personal experience two stops overexposure should be OK when processed at the rated ISO of the film (400 in your case.) They will just have to adjust the printing. Don't know about 2&1/2-3 though. It seems like it would pull OK, but you would have to find a lab that would do it for you, and in my experience the average lab can't alter the setting to something different than the ISO on the film. Someone might know a pro-lab that could pull it for you though.

good luck,

Will