I recently got a 550 Polaroid back and shot my first sheet of FP100C45. I think this could really come in handy for verifying exposure and composition for important shots. Using my usual metering technique (guess exposure), my test-Polaroid turned out somewhat overexposed. I suppose this is unsurprising since I generally expose negative film with just a bit of a "safety factor" but I was wondering how much latitude this stuff has. If it's anything like color transparency film, then I should get a good negative exposure if I get any sort of picture at all on the polaroid, and the slight over exposure I saw today is nothing to worry about. But, I'm not sure.
It will lead you away from your film's ideal exposure if you base the exposure on the instant print.
It is a waste of money and time for checking composition, because you have eyes and can look at your image in the camera before you shoot. If you are using it in the first place, then you have time to do this very carefully, even with a loupe if you want.
What it is good for is checking lighting ratios and other such things (besides just using it to take pix, of course).
Positive materials have no latitude at all in and of themselves, if you consider the positive the final product. They have latitude in as much as they can be corrected in litho, Ilfochrome, or hybrid printing.
If you meant "dynamic range" as opposed to "latitude", while I have not tested it in a controlled manner, I would say the prints have about four and a half to five stops of it. It is a contrasty medium, to say the least.
Something with so little dynamic range, that is also a positive material, will obviously have very little latitude. It only has as much latitude as your chosen enlargement processes will allow, and, as Steve and I have already said, it has NO latitude if you consider the instant print to be the final product, simply by virtue of it being a direct positive product.
Incident metering is the way to go with this material, IMO. If you are shooting the stuff in a situation with a luminance range of over five stops, you are going to dump either the low end or the high end. You can pick one to lose, or, by using an incident meter to effectively place your midtones where they should be, you can get [IMO] the most important part of the picture exposed well, and split the difference between dumping the high and low ends.
If Fuji is giving it to you for free, you have all the time in the world when shooting, don't mind if your exposures are a bit off, and like shooting and collecting thousands of instant prints, then go for it!
