Portra 160 and 400: Squeezing out medium format?

First: there is no substitute for square inches. Larger negatives give better quality. From what I have heard (which is neither much nor particularly reliable), 120 sales are doing well and are a quite respectable portion of color film sales. That would indicate that the higher quality of the new films is not squeezing out medium format. I certainly appreciate that quality, since I can now reliably get a good 12X16 from a 645 negative. Often, even bigger is possible. Most people crop 6X6 to roughly 645 proportions, so those results will be similar. But if you print square, it means a 16X16 is routinely possible. There is a trend toward larger prints, and that means that 6X7 and 2X3 negatives can give good results for really big prints. If anything is squeezed, it may be the sheet film sizes. I haven't tried the latest batch of color negative films in 35mm yet, but the previous bunch still were marginal, but generally OK, at 11X14.

Poisson Du Jour said:

As Bob Dylan mumbled, "things have changed".
And things could be different, too.

Between 1998 and 2006 I was hired to photograph Renewal of Vows ceremonies and often spectularly abrasive Divorce Ceremony at a nudist colony.
Vows ceremonies were gracious, planned but pretty ordinary, all shot on 35mm (Canon EOS 50E) and 6x4 K-Mart gloss prints presented in $2.00 plastic folders (the resort owner asked for "nothing fancy or schmancy"!). I then added my $700 Fee for Professional Services. Everybody happy.

For the Divorce gatherings, again, I used 35mm, but plastic point-and-shoot disposable cameras because I was frequently a target during the messy punch-ups, screaming, hissing tantrums and vituperative tirades before they were all dumped into the mud bath — with me dragged along "you too, for bloody good measure!" to sort out their differences in the sludge. Very difficult stuff to grapple with. The resort closed in March 2010 after an illustrious, fun-field 25 years.

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I would pay them to be given the opportunity to shoot an acrimonious divorce in a nudist colony, and would probably be able to live for years on the proceeds

I need to open a wedding-night photography business and shoot it on 8x10" Portra.

I know the cheapie Godox 600ws strobes fill a reasonably size room via ceiling bounce at about f/11 and ISO 100. Or maybe I could go for dramatic lighting.

That last event should have been on the Jerry Springer Show.

Poisson Du Jour said:

As Bob Dylan mumbled, "things have changed".
And things could be different, too.

Between 1998 and 2006 I was hired to photograph Renewal of Vows ceremonies and often spectularly abrasive Divorce Ceremony at a nudist colony.
Vows ceremonies were gracious, planned but pretty ordinary, all shot on 35mm (Canon EOS 50E) and 6x4 K-Mart gloss prints presented in $2.00 plastic folders (the resort owner asked for "nothing fancy or schmancy"!). I then added my $700 Fee for Professional Services. Everybody happy.

For the Divorce gatherings, again, I used 35mm, but plastic point-and-shoot disposable cameras because I was frequently a target during the messy punch-ups, screaming, hissing tantrums and vituperative tirades before they were all dumped into the mud bath — with me dragged along "you too, for bloody good measure!" to sort out their differences in the sludge. Very difficult stuff to grapple with. The resort closed in March 2010 after an illustrious, fun-field 25 years.

Click to expand...

nworth said:

First: there is no substitute for square inches. Larger negatives give better quality. From what I have heard (which is neither much nor particularly reliable), 120 sales are doing well and are a quite respectable portion of color film sales. That would indicate that the higher quality of the new films is not squeezing out medium format. I certainly appreciate that quality, since I can now reliably get a good 12X16 from a 645 negative. Often, even bigger is possible. Most people crop 6X6 to roughly 645 proportions, so those results will be similar. But if you print square, it means a 16X16 is routinely possible. There is a trend toward larger prints, and that means that 6X7 and 2X3 negatives can give good results for really big prints. If anything is squeezed, it may be the sheet film sizes. I haven't tried the latest batch of color negative films in 35mm yet, but the previous bunch still were marginal, but generally OK, at 11X14.

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This is true to a point. Richard Misrach went and shot his documentary work of the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, originally planning to shoot on (IIRC) a 12x20 and make MASSIVE enlargements of them (massive as in 8' x 10' - 2400x 3000 cm or thereabouts). The problem he ran into was the fact that the optics required to cover that large a piece of film demanded the use of extremely small f-stops in order to get the needed depth of field. Resolution then became diffraction limited and the end result was worse with the bigger negative, so he went with 8x10" instead, for an approximately 12x enlargement. And having seen one of these mammoth enlargements in person, I can say that 8x10 was more than enough to hold up to the enlargement. Yes you could see grain if you print-sniffed, but what's the point? And the prints are pretty amazing as a technical accomplishment - they're actually composed of two pieces spliced together because no paper was made in rolls that wide - the widest at the time was 48". Yet if you look at the print, to detect the seam, you have to print-sniff.

Quality is one issue, client impatience another. Today lots of young couples want their wedding shot
digital because they want it posted on the web immediately. Plus the photographer can let them
choose particular images that way too. The archivability and quality of the images does not seem to
be a priority anymore. It's all about now,now, now ...I want it yesterday. But most people including
photographer know that film is likely to give better results in terms of color and tonality. And there
is still a niche market for this at the upper end. And there is a niche for high end black and white work, even in an otherwise bottom-feeder market like this. But there has been a significant generational shift. No more albums or framed portraits on the wall. Just the web and some fuzzball
desktop printouts. Goes appropriately with our culture of fast food, instant junk information, and
junk politics.

DREW WILEY said:

Quality is one issue, client impatience another. Today lots of young couples want their wedding shot
digital because they want it posted on the web immediately. Plus the photographer can let them
choose particular images that way too. The archivability and quality of the images does not seem to
be a priority anymore. It's all about now,now, now ...I want it yesterday. But most people including
photographer know that film is likely to give better results in terms of color and tonality. And there
is still a niche market for this at the upper end. And there is a niche for high end black and white work, even in an otherwise bottom-feeder market like this. But there has been a significant generational shift. No more albums or framed portraits on the wall. Just the web and some fuzzball
desktop printouts. Goes appropriately with our culture of fast food, instant junk information, and
junk politics.

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It's 2012 and the marrying demographic isn't uniformly flush enough to afford 5-8 large or more for a traditional book. Despite all their angst, many wedding photographers priced themselves out of the market and ignored changing tastes. They didn't all do great work--and still don't.

Good additional point, CGW ... My own strategy to personal photography is to ignore the whole genre. If someone wants me to do it, I charge per print, at prices equivalent to any other fine art
print I sell. Those things are keepers that in up in frames, and probably get shot with an 8x10.
Someone else can do the event itself.

CGW said:

It's 2012 and the marrying demographic isn't uniformly flush enough to afford 5-8 large or more for a traditional book. Despite all their angst, many wedding photographers priced themselves out of the market and ignored changing tastes. They didn't all do great work--and still don't.

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This weekend I lost out on shooting a wedding to a college girl who had a "nice camera" because they couldn't even afford my give-away "friends and family" pricing. These are the types of weddings where the couple is paying for everything themselves, all the party favors have been bought at heavy discount over a year, the wedding dress was beautiful, but bought at a discount from a place 200 miles away for under $400. The cake made by an aunt who used to do them for a living. Reception held in the old Elks hall. Maybe 40 people came to the wedding itself.

This represents the "normal" wedding these days. Very few of these are shot by the high-brow wedding photographers. If the couple wants a photographic memory, they do just what this couple did and have a friend or relative just help them out. Come to think of it, that's what my wife and I did when we got married. Really, this isn't anything new. I believe the spate of high priced weddings went out with the '90s and even at that, it wasn't really all for that long of a time.

I used to photograph for a wedding photography company that specialized in "affordable" packages. Even at those prices, it was not unusual for me to be the highest priced part of the entire wedding--sometimes as much as the rest of the entire wedding combined.

So, where does that leave us today? I used to have a jam-packed business (and made a handsome profit) when I had near giveaway prices, but I raised my prices up to trim off some of the riff-raff but evidently went too far because I crossed a pricing threshold that filtered out all but the segment of the market all the other photographers are after. No middle ground. If they can afford $1000 they can afford $5000. But if they can't afford $1000 they can't seem to afford $500 either.

For the wedding photographer, it's ALL "carriage trade" now. Either horse-drawn carriage or baby carriage. The market that used to be our bread and butter demographic doesn't even bother getting married now--they just live together.

Finer 'grain' now in films is one thing, but nothing beats more grains or more color clouds to portray the same amount of subject area! That provides a level of tonality or color rendition that using fewer grains and color clouds will never replicate.

24x36mm (135 format) = 864 sq.mm.
43x55mm (645 format) = 2653 sq.mm., or 3.05x as much area of film

If we make 8x10 prints from both negatives, we are really comparing 720 sq.mm vs. 2311 sq.mm. of image area from each negative, captured in the 8x10" print, or 3.21x as many color clouds or film grains.

It's not just dye clouds. All film has a certain amt of mfg zits and blemises which show up at higher
levels of magnification, esp on open skies or low contrast areas of skintone. If you shoot a grainy
35mm film for the sake of conspicuous grain, these might not show up. But nothing is more miserable
or monotonous than spotting, whether done manually or in PS. Those old Kodak ads gave me a kick
when they advertised "4x5 quality using 35mm film", referring to the introduction of Tech Pan film with a low-contrast developer. Yeah, you could get a lot of detail, but every area of homogenous
tone in a large print would be specked with random zits too. I recently optically enlarged a 6x7
Ektar shot to 20X24 and had the same issue. Much of this doesn't show up on an inkjet print because they aren't all that sharp to begin with. In the old days, the pro labs kept someone on payroll who did virtually nothing else than spot portrait prints all day long. Not a career I'd care for!

But nothing is more miserable
or monotonous than spotting, whether done manually or in PS.

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Tell me about spotting in PSHOP. <*groan*> Four hours despecking a 6x17cm tranny, multiply that by six. And they say d***** is the future. No thank you.

Isn't Trent Parke of Magnum a devotee film noir using Tech Pan film? I don't know for sure, I seem to recall his name and something Kodak in the same sentence a long time ago.

I took a couple of 6X7's to Maui last year, one with Ektar film in it, the other with b&w film. It's a damn poor substitute for 4x5 film but I had a reason. I wanted to get up on Haleakala looking down on all the wild clouds from above. I got exactly the atmospheric conditions and color of light that I was hoping for, but also the inevitable high winds which would have turned a view camera into a kite. Just for the hell of it I printed a 20X24 CDUII print from one of the Ektar negs, and properly
plus-masked it for holding full contrast. Nice image, but I spent about two hours spotting the sky in
each print. Photoshop spotting would have worked better, but still been a pain in the butt, and I
can't stand the look of most digital prints for crisp high-contrast subject matter, maybe certain other
stuff. Besides, I've got my color darkroom and no incentive to change. With large format film the
amt of spotting on that size print would have been essentially zero.

Poisson Du Jour said:

Tell me about spotting in PSHOP. <*groan*> Four hours despecking a 6x17cm tranny, multiply that by six. And they say d***** is the future. No thank you.

Isn't Trent Parke of Magnum a devotee film noir using Tech Pan film? I don't know for sure, I seem to recall his name and something Kodak in the same sentence a long time ago.

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You know, spotting is one of the things, I prefer to do digitally. Your transparency/negative is only exposed for a short time, and then it can safely go back in it's sleeve or box. You work all your spotting magic on a copy, which can then be sent to a lab, for a spot-free print to be made.