Overexposing color negative film?

[DREW WILEY]

I once had to work with a fellow with a Cockney accent, and couldn't understand a word he said. Why can't the darn Brits learn to speak English anyway? At least my ancestors had the common sense to break out of prison in England the day before they were due to be hanged as livestock thieves, and stow away on the second ship after the Mayflower as fine patriotic upstarts to this continent. No wonder Ilford doesn't make color film - the instructions would be impossible to pronounce. I think it's something like the Doppler shift in the color of distant galaxies. Once light crosses the International Date Line, the overexposure crossover shift goes the opposite direction. Just a hypothesis. First, I still need to prove that an upside-down image in a view camera becomes rightside-up in the southern hemisphere, and exactly sideways on the equator; but cruise ships don't sound very appealing at the moment.

 

[pentaxuser]

Nice one Drew. The great bell of Bow chimed midnight abaht an 'our ago and it seems like hours since I had me jim skinner so its up the apples and pears for me wif a smile on me boat while singing:

"Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim cheree , a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be". It's a funny old language and the 'ollywood version of it is even funnier and nearly as complicated as colour crossover. Note correct spelling of colour, me china.

As you knew a fellow with a cockney accent I'll leave it to you to explain to the rest of your countrymen what the above means and for gawd's sake take it easy on that colour crossover stuff. If you must keep having a swig of it then take it with a pinch of humour as you have tonight. Yes it tastes blander but helps you live longer and makes you feel better. A bit like that Coors Lite stuff served at Eskimo temperature which then suffers from that temperature crossover and loses any taste it had

pentaxuser

 

[DREW WILEY]

Coors LIte??? Give us a little more respect than that ! That's what I call student beer, made expressly for idiotic Frat party drunkenness. It's the Kodacolor Gold of macrobrews. Here we prefer local microbrews like Pliny the Elder. But even imported Guiness will do, though maybe not for your Cockney crowd, who might prefer something a little more akin to lighter fluid.

 

[pentaxuser]

Drew we'll get thrown off Photrio if we continue this discussion on beer which I started . Let me just say that I am sure there is a massive range of beers in the U.S. with real taste but we in the U.K. just get a few to try and the latest "fad" is or was a very short time ago Coors Lite in a chain of pubs called Wetherspoon The main selling point for the twenty-somethings seemed to be the fact that it was served at about 1-2 degrees C and it was probably designed for the same crowd over here as you describe "over there"

There may be beers that are as good or better at these incredibly low temperatures close to freezing point but they are not for me. We have some good beers in the U.K. but equally I have tasted stuff that was closer to lukewarm alcoholic tea than beer.

pentaxuser

 

[Agulliver]

Coors is beer? I don't think you've even been discussing beer
And yes, there are some excellent American beers...you just won't find them in the supermarket at all, nor in a bar unless they stock genuine local brews.

Anyone tried developing over exposed ektar in lite "beer" ?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Ektar Lite? I think they label it Portra.

 

[pentaxuser]

Ektar Lite? I think they label it Portra.

Nice one, Drew

pentaxuser

 

[Down Under]

Drew, I've long had the same problem with Australians - many of them speak a language unlike anything invented using the term English, but altho they mostly deny it and even threaten violent consequences to anyone even suggesting it, many descendants of Limeys here are from convict stock, shipped off to the Antipodes during the period 1780-1860 to clear the prisons of England of both minor and major offenders from working-class origins. (The Landed Gentry came later and many now wish they had stayed home.) To those who may consider this statement as derogatory, I will add that in less than a decade after arriving in Sydney and Tasmania often in chains, many of the savvier ones were land owners with large properties and prosperous farms in a classic Buddhist example of good karma flowing out of bad.

As for beer, well - Coors is nectar compared to many Aussie brands, with the exception of an age-old lager called Crown Lager, once de rigueur at dinner parties but now tres passe, and a few Tasmanian lagers supposedly made with Tasmanian river water, rich in fish juices but very little industrial pollution. Offsetting this, fortunately for me, is that this far-flung big island in the bac-kblocks of the Pacific produces a great range of superb wines, many of these regarded by connoisseurs as among the best in the world. Even our $10 table wines are as good as anything in the same price range produced by the French. Not the Italians, but beyond saying this, I'll say no more.

To return to the topic of this thread - I've consistently overexposed all my color negative films by up to one stop since the 1960s, and two stops from the 1980s when the film makers seemed to have improved their negative films to handle more than the usual overexposure. I recall telling an American lady in Melbourne in 1990 to shoot all her neg film (the standard back then was ISO 100) at 80 on cloudy days and at 64 in heavy overcast or closeups in shade. She did so and later showed me her prints - the color quality was outstanding. I felt - vindicated.

Today with scanners, scanning and computer post-processing, the relatively minor color shifts caused by overexposure can be easily adjusted, even with the free shareware. My partner is currently PP'ing many ancient (late 1960s-1990) Kodak color negatives shot by family members with those hateful Instamatics. The requisite tests and fiddling with color sliders is awe-worthy but with diligence and care and an endless amount of time involved (which we have with Covid lockdowns in place), results are surprisingly good. Sharpness, forget it, but the rest looks okay, or at least passable.

So yes, it can be done.

BTW, a good comment - "New Ektar Lite? I think they label it Portra." I wish I'd said that!

 

[pentaxuser]

The problem with colour crossover is that some of us still print on RA4 after exposure under an enlarger so cannot correct colour crossover i.e. we are not hybrid users. That means that what ever causes colour crossover at the exposure stage or in processing needs to be eliminated. Part of that elimination is knowing for sure at what point a film is, on balance, liable to exhibit colour crossover in case there are conditions in which longer exposures are needed. Getting to anything near a consensus on how much leeway a film has in terms of exposure both over and under can be very difficult.

It would appear that over-exposure to the extent of at least 2 stops seems to be the consensus with most colour films but Ektar may be the exception here. Unfortunately as I said in another unrelated post, the key to this is enough users showing enough examples of over and under exposure plus a knowledge of users' standards so their standards can be compared to the person seeking to know how much he can over/under-expose and still meet his standards.

Like anything else in photography there is what you should do to give yourself the best fighting chance of producing the best negative and what you either have to do because of conditions or want to try and do, let's say for artistic reasons or to see what is possible, without ruining any chance of a printable negative.

pentaxuser

 

[foc]

I have been watching this thread fro the side and I have to say I always shot at box speed when I shot film professionally.
For weddings/commercial it was Reala and NPH and studio Reala and always at box speed.
Ok I processed and printed all my own work but very little correction was ever needed for my prints. On a few occasions, I was asked to make prints by another pro (the type that know it all ) and their exposures were all over the place. I tried telling them that (by the best diplomatic way I could) but NO it was the processing and printing NEVER their exposures.

So for me it is always box speed but why not have fun trying something different.
Here are a few links that might be of interest.

https://www.richardphotolab.com/blog/post/find-your-film-stock-and-exposure-comparisons

https://carmencitafilmlab.com/how-exposure-affects-film/

Regarding beer and spoken English, well you know where I am from.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I too shoot Portra at box speed and rarely use the Zone System to bring out details in the shadows. I rather stay away from color crossover problems.

 

[DREW WILEY]

What on earth does the Zone System have to do with color photography anyway? I don't know anybody other than AA himself trying to squeeze color film into that irrelevant exposure model. That's one of the reasons he didn't like shooting color - it didn't stretch or compress like black and white. ... But as long as we're talking about crossover : Portrait films like Portra itself are engineered with a certain amount of what I term "mud" in them, of a warmish variety, for sake of "pleasant skintones" at the expense of more accurate overall hue reproduction. Ektar renders crossover differently, and potentially unpleasantly, because it's engineered for a more realistic look, with better overall color balance IF exposure and color temp issues are optimized. And in that respect, it makes no difference if you're printing optically RA4 or digitally. Once those curves cross over, you'll have mixed your own kind of "mud"; but it won't be warm and cozy - more likely cold cyan-inflected. And you're not going to easily unmix it, if at all. Like I've stated many times, it's far far easier to control all this right at the time of the shot. If you want to sit on your arse endless hours dithering and slithering in order to re-paint portions of a shot, it's you're right to do so. But don't pretend that you can fix just anything in Fauxtoshop. Sure, anyone can get half-baked result . But that's typically just an excuse for never learning how the optimize a particular film in the first place, and the so-so results in an actual print will show it. Then people go around whining how bad the film is, and how stupid people at Kodak were, and so forth, rather than trying to understand that specific film in its own right.

 

[pentaxuser]

Delivered well, Drew, although there may be just an unintentional hint that anyone shooting other than Ektar and doing it the same way as you are second-raters or "durned horn squagglers" Did I make that word up? Maybe, although I am convinced that Gabby used it in one of the Randolph Scott westerns.

Randolph got the girl but Gabby got the best colour shot of the saloon with Ektar. Gary was so concerned about avoiding mud in colour westerns that he elected to do his best western in B&W. Even Tex has it written in to his contract that he had to sing in B&W. I may have just made that last bit up

pentaxuser

 

[DREW WILEY]

That's as disgusting as Coors Lite. I rewatched a Clint Eastwood western a couple nites ago, and with a couple of exceptions, is the only kind of Western I'll watch. I literally grew up with cowboys and Indians, and there is almost nothing as fake in Hollywood history as seeing John Wayne interacting with Arizona "Apache" Indians dressed up like high plains Sioux and northeast Iroquois, while riding around the Alabama Hills in the California desert with a telephone line in the background and jet contrails overhead in the sky. I've only been to Texas once, on a business trip, and it's the only third-world country I've ever been to. Everybody around has two cigarettes in his mouth, plus at least one in each nostril and ear.
Even the real cowboys I rode the range with as a kid termed these, "coffin nails". Smoking the worst brand was for sake of bravado, which some of them came to deeply regret later in life, as they slowly died of lung cancer. But at least they weren't pretend cowboys. ... Sooo, want to make the most influential photo in history? Grab some outdated Kodacolor gold, focus poorly, then enlarge it to forty feet wide, and plaster it beside every highway on multiple continents, and kill more people than any war has - it's called the Marlboro Man. No Ektar needed.

 

[pentaxuser]

I am still a big fan of Gary and the rest of the cast in High Noon as opposed to Clint but the rest of what you said in #39 is spot-on. Fascinating era was the 50s. Didn't even your doctor recommend Camels on billboards

pentaxuser

 

[DREW WILEY]

Joe Camel was out there, but never even bothered to show up at the OK Corral shootout. In my neck of the woods, the cowboys smoked Old Golds because these were even more raunchy than Marlboros, or else rolled their own, probably using ingredients the horses left behind on the pasture. I never smoked, thank goodness. My favorite western of all had Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in it, as the epic, Once Upon a Time in the Old West. I don't watch movies unless it's late in the day and I'm simply too tired and lazy to do anything else. But even though I had to finally sell my own little ranch due to it getting harder and harder to keep up with all the forest fire prevention chores, and finding the summer heat more intolerable, I still covet the summer golds and muted rust-tones, and complex gray-greens of our California rangelands and lower hills, which I find far more compelling than all the sugar-coated colors of stereotypical calendar fall foliage. Hence my endless quest to find a film and printing method which can replicate the subtlety and neutrality of these hues. A watercolorist could mix such such hues in minutes, but photographic technology, perhaps never, it seems. Digital printing is the least effective at it, a step backwards in my opinion. But I get enough hits on target to keep me going, and hope that just over the next hill, somewhere on the horizon, a silver bullet will appear before I'm too old to even load the revolver in time for High Noon.

 

[Wayne]

I loved old gold...such a raunchy golden west flavor.