Overly grainy photos with Canon AE-1P?

Stuarrt · Mar 29, 2017

MattKing said:
By "developer" do you mean a photo lab or do you mean the chemicals for developing it yourself? I use London Drugs or ABC Photo in Vancouver for C41 (print) film and London Drugs (35mm) and The Lab (35mm and 120) in Vancouver for E6 slides.

Chemicals for developing it your self. I was using the unicolor kit but I found it died very quickly. I don't have much of a choice, I live way to far out of town to drop any film off plus I don't think I could afford $8 a roll lol.

It is a very nice place, but it has its ups and downs. Having to spend 3 and a half hours on the bus a day in order to get to school can be somewhat of a drag, plus it gets extremely busy here in the summer. But at this time of year when the snow starts to melt there's no place I'd rather be

Les Sarile · Mar 29, 2017

Stuarrt said:
Alrighty, so it does appear to be my fault and not the camera's.
First image was 1/250 at 5.6 and the second was at f8.
The canon read 5.6 when I looked at the cliffs while it read f8 when I just looked straight ahead.
I'll just have to be careful and follow the sunny 16 rule I suppose.
How would that work when I'm inside?

How did you extract the picture from the film has a lot to do with it to.
For instance, I took the liberty of enhancing the darker image you posted and derived this.

Normally "underexposed" will look "grainier" when dark images are adjusted lighter and this image of yours does not seem to suffer that. I certainly wouldn't consider this "grainy" even with moderate amount of adjustment. Of course if you are only familiar with digital then maybe this is "too grainy" by comparison.

Theo Sulphate · Mar 29, 2017

If the lighting situation is tricky, it is always better to overexpose with negative film (color or B&W) - not so with transparency film.

Negative film can handle a fair bit of overexposure. Underexposure is much worse.

Unlike digital, you won't blow the highlights out.

Les Sarile · Mar 29, 2017

Stuarrt, Since you say you are new to film and perhaps only experienced with digital, here are some very general practices to help you get started. When it comes to color negatives (aka C41), they are considerably less prone to burning out highlights. Digital users have known since the first models to use the histogram to prevent overexposing as well as shooting in RAW. By comparison, color negatives and b&w (chromogenic and true b&w) film have a much wider tolerance for overexposure by comparison as shown below.

As you can see, by 3 stops overexposure, digital files are no longer recoverable while even Kodak Ektar 100 is still very workable and Kodak Portra 400 has much to go.

Here is the full range that I shot of Kodak Portra 400.

Simply, this means err on the side of overexposure as you have plenty of latitude to recover.

In practical application, you can shoot an extremely wide latitude scene and recover detail in both shadows and overexposure as in the example below as well as your own example that I adjusted.

Stuarrt · Mar 29, 2017

Les Sarile said:
How did you extract the picture from the film has a lot to do with it to.
For instance, I took the liberty of enhancing the darker image you posted and derived this.

Normally "underexposed" will look "grainier" when dark images are adjusted lighter and this image of yours does not seem to suffer that. I certainly wouldn't consider this "grainy" even with moderate amount of adjustment. Of course if you are only familiar with digital then maybe this is "too grainy" by comparison.

Oh my bad. In the previous post above I stated I was going to use my digital camera to see where I might possibly of gone wrong with the film.
But no, I do agree that's not grainy at all. I'm usually completely fine with grain, like these pictures I took in london for example
http://tinypic.com/r/292l83k/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2r23wo5/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2hfqlie/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2rx90sg/9
Not as sharp as I would of liked them to be but I think theyre clean enough (for my standards anyway)
I don't want to come across as a kid who's only shooting film because it's "trendy" right now, so if that's the impression I gave off I apologies.

Les Sarile · Mar 29, 2017

Stuarrt said:
I don't want to come across as a kid who's only shooting film because it's "trendy" right now, so if that's the impression I gave off I apologies.

I am all for using film for any reason anyone wants to.

I have no room to judge . . .

Stuarrt · Mar 29, 2017

Les Sarile said:
Stuarrt, Since you say you are new to film and perhaps only experienced with digital, here are some very general practices to help you get started. When it comes to color negatives (aka C41), they are considerably less prone to burning out highlights. Digital users have known since the first models to use the histogram to prevent overexposing as well as shooting in RAW. By comparison, color negatives and b&w (chromogenic and true b&w) film have a much wider tolerance for overexposure by comparison as shown below.

As you can see, by 3 stops overexposure, digital files are no longer recoverable while even Kodak Ektar 100 is still very workable and Kodak Portra 400 has much to go.

Here is the full range that I shot of Kodak Portra 400.

Simply, this means err on the side of overexposure as you have plenty of latitude to recover.

In practical application, you can shoot an extremely wide latitude scene and recover detail in both shadows and overexposure as in the example below as well as your own example that I adjusted.

That's actually really good information to know. Didn't realize you can overexpose film that much, while still getting usable images from it. That was one of my big concerns was blowing out the highlights. Thank you

MattKing · Mar 30, 2017

Stuarrt said:
Oh my bad. In the previous post above I stated I was going to use my digital camera to see where I might possibly of gone wrong with the film.
But no, I do agree that's not grainy at all. I'm usually completely fine with grain, like these pictures I took in london for example
http://tinypic.com/r/292l83k/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2r23wo5/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2hfqlie/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2rx90sg/9
Not as sharp as I would of liked them to be but I think theyre clean enough (for my standards anyway)
I don't want to come across as a kid who's only shooting film because it's "trendy" right now, so if that's the impression I gave off I apologies.

Take the negatives that those pictures came from, and compare them visually with the negatives that yielded the "grainy" scans. I think you will see a difference!
How well are you controlling temperature with the Unicolour kit, and what temperature are you using?

Overly grainy photos with Canon AE-1P?

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