Trying to understand C41 film.

rayonline_nz

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I have shot mainly slide film. Velvia is more saturated but Provia gives a pretty much neutral standard look.

I just got a roll of Portra 400 back from the lab. I have a roll of Portra 160 in the camera now. I am trying to understand C41 film. Provia slide film gives you are very standard looking image. Portra 400 gives you quite a different looking image even under a blue sky beach day here (southern hemisphere). Skintones can be said to look nicer on people.

In the past they had more Portra films available. In the C41 world, if a wedding photographer wanted more an accurate looking image what would they had shot and is that available today? Because in the past the Olympics games were shot on colour negative film and journalism .....

One other thing with slide film I go to recipe is ISO 100, F8, 10 seconds in regards to night cityscapes. With Portra 400, I used F8 and 10 seconds due to 2.5 seconds becoming 5 seconds due to reciprocity and then to 10 seconds to overexpose it b/c it has the latitude. Night shots of buildings the sky became quite white the image looked like daylight. What am I doing wrong?


Many thanks.
 

MattKing

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The various flavours of Portra that used to be available exhibited a variety of saturations and, to a certain extent, contrast.
If you are/were a wedding photographer, you really wanted moderate contrast and moderate saturation, in order to retain the detail in both the bride's dress and the groom's outfit.
The wedding photographer also wanted something that would flatter when makeup was overdone, and lighting was harsh.
The accuracy is/was available in all the Portra films. The contrast and saturation is, in current circumstances, more often adjusted digitally.
If you are using negative films, you are more dependent now on either (hard to find) high quality optical enlargements or, much more commonly found, high quality digital post processing.
 

Sirius Glass

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If you can find them: Kodak UltraColor and Kodak VividColor, otherwise try Ektar 100.
 
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rayonline_nz

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I have a roll of Ektar 100 in the freezer my first. Despite it being available for these years. I have shot mainly slides. I have searched the Internet and Provia has more shadow and highlights and Portra has more a flatter even look. Yeah .. it is ideal for wedding whites and blacks. It is almost though, Portra is for the artist use or the wedding photographers use. Looking at the images they were good pleasing skintone portraits but it felt a bit separated from reality. You got this more even look more painted look which felt different to someone who just went to Hawaii for a vacation ....

Re: night photography with Portra. Tonight over here I might go out again and shoot a few images bracketed and see the results maybe. The talk about Portra having all this latitude and it is hard to go too far by overexposing it. What about night time? Would the blacks look less black?

Re: daylight. I took a few rated at box speed and then as overexposed by 2 stops (rated as 100 by accidental actually!). In the daytime no "real" noticeable difference really.
 

Sirius Glass

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YoIaMoNwater

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I hate Portra 400... except shooting it at night. You can easily push it -1 stop without adjusting develop time. When I first shot a roll of Portra 400 at daylight I shot it at -6 stops to get that dark/contrasty street photography style.

I love Portra 160... except shooting it at night. This film does not handle underexposure well. It's a great stock to shoot under sunny weathers with -1 or -2 stops to get that contrasty look. Honestly when this film is shot correctly it can actually look like Kodakchrome. There's just that amount of softness that shots of it can almost look like paintings.

Ektar is definitely my go to color negative film. Ultramax pushed one or two stops also gives vivid colors, especially the reds. Gold is also nice, though when underexposed for deeper shadows the skin tone of people turns orange.

You just got try it yourself to see whether or not it's something you like.
 

MattKing

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With slide film, what you get is determined by the film, the circumstances of the scene (the light!) and your exposure choices.
The developing too.
With negative film, what you get is determined by all that, plus the interaction between that and the printing/post processing parts of the process.
And it is the latter that makes the most difference.
That interaction is where the latitude comes from.
 
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rayonline_nz

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Yep got that from your past post. Have it printed out now. Yep my exposure times were quite bang on converted to the ISO 400 for Portra 400 of course but the black skies were less blacks unless I totally read the scene incorrectly. I was photographing some boats parked over at the wharf together away from much bright lights. I according to the jiffy tool, I used 10sec than overexposed it 1 stop to 20sec equiv of ISO 100, jiffy said ISO 100 at 45 seconds. Despite that Portra 400 came out OK actually but the sky was a brighter blue than what I expected.

What I see so far. Portra 400 at least suits portraiture maybe a different color balance towards documentary or ethnography, less of a Provia look.
 

AgX

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Agfa had their "Triade" range of 3 films of different speed, contrast and saturation. But that was in the 90's...
 

Les Sarile

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I have an affinity to night time shots, particularly extremely long exposures. From all I've shot to date, I don't even consider reciprocity characteristics.

This one on Kodak Portra 400 was about 2-4 seconds.



This one on Portra 800 for about 15 minutes . . .



This one on Ektar 100 about 45 minutes . . .

 
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rayonline_nz

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Re: white balance or colour balance. Could the adjustments be done at the lab by the technician or in software knowing that Les has a Coolscan?

Yeah .. This is the real proper time me shooting C41 film. In the past it has been more holiday vacations and using Nikon's 3D matrix meter. This time I used a Hasselblad 500CM with my Sekonic 758 but with night photographs as I have read and done myself I don't use a meter.

@Les Sarile, the 2nd image Portra 800 for 15mins with city buildings at night? Isn't that a bit long? Generally speaking even with ISO 100, F8, I only use 10 seconds at most usually with those scenes if it is especially dark maybe 20 or 40 seconds but really no more. How does your image look straight out of the Coolscan? Do you do any adjustments with the Nikon software and other software afterwards? Wouldn't a scanner think you shot the image under daytime and want to render the colours that way?

Kodak's film datasheet doesn't say anything with reciprocity but they said more than 1 second do your own testing but I found this.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/477426@N23/discuss/72157635197694957/
 

Les Sarile

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I revisited the original scans and they are the same as scanned except for cropping and mild touchup but no color adjustments.
When I scan, all cotor controls are off or neutral and I very seldom make substantial color adjustments in post as I like the ambient lighting as they are. For instance this Kodak Ektar 100 was exposed about >45minutes and this is as it comes out of my scanner. I believe these are sodium lights that give it a greenish tint towards the front and less so in the back.



These scenes are so dark that getting critical focus on a manual camera is not easy. Just to give you an idea, I took a shot of this scene on my smartphone and this is what it looked like . . .

 

Les Sarile

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I used my Pentax LX in aperture priority mode for all the shots above so it determined the lenght of these autoexposures. For the Portra 800 shot, I also took a celphone photo of the scene.

Here is the Portra 800 shot, a different frame from the same roll and about the same exposure time.



Here is the celphone shot of the scene above . . .



Maybe this gives you a better understanding of why the exposure time was what it was?

I also looked at the resiprocity characteristics and as you found out, data - specially for the lenght of exposures I am getting, are not accounted for. This is fine because the datasheets do say to try it out yourself so I did.

I conducted extremely long autoexposure tests with my Pentax LX and my Sekonic meter on Fuji 100 color negatives and those came out looking very "normal".



Then on Kodak Gold 100 and these came out "normal" too.



So I just stopped testing them this way and just started using them and see how they come out. I see no reciprocity issues but obviously ambient lighting will be more consequential.
 

Chan Tran

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If the imalge looks like daylight and has lot of details in both highlight and shadow area then it's perfect. All you have to do is to print or scan the negative darker.
 
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rayonline_nz

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Chan Tran said:
If the imalge looks like daylight and has lot of details in both highlight and shadow area then it's perfect. All you have to do is to print or scan the negative darker.
Click to expand...

Yes, I was able to do that. Had to be pretty strong with my settings thou. Unlike slide film, Portra 400 has so much latitude which I found out.

Question; if I metered it accurately as you do with slide film. Can the scanner give you an accurate as shot / as metered image or does it try to render it as a mid tone?
 
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rayonline_nz

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15min exposure and the film can handle it. Hmm ... you could just use 4mins and went home earlier, hahah.
 

Les Sarile

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rayonline_nz said:
15min exposure and the film can handle it. Hmm ... you could just use 4mins and went home earlier, hahah.
Click to expand...

My wife didn't think it was funny!
For these long autoexposures I had to constantly take a peek through the viewfinder to see if it was done because there are no external indicators on the Pentax LX to let you know that. So I asked around if there was anything I could use as an indicator for when the exposure was done and someone suggested to check the flash sync port. So now I have an LED+battery tied to it - it lights when the camera is exposing and turns off when done. This is specially helpful on some of these hours long exposures!

 

Sirius Glass

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How clever!
 
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rayonline_nz

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@Les Sarile would you have a place where you store your film testing results? I find it very useful I am interested in some other films if you have them.

Question; since you have tested your film. Why did you had to use those long exposures? You could had used a shorter shutter speed right? Were you just out doing something and it was convenient to just leave the camera outside? Haha.

I looked at the jiffy chart and those shutter speeds are out of scope.
 

Sirius Glass

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When I took slides with the Jiffy Calculator with Kodachrome and Ektachrome one would go green and and the other red from reciprocity failure. I do not remember which went which way for sure, but I think Kodachrome would go green and Ektachrome red.
 
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rayonline_nz

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Thanks to Les for his contribution, Portra 400 and 160 and the above images here have been very useful. Just wondering if there are other results, I know you cannot do so with slide film but I would like to see the results if an available with Ektachrome, Provia and Velvia even if it raised some eyelids!

I was using my Sekonic 758 light meter with the incident meter with family portraits trying out Portra 400, a professional grade wedding film right. I accidentally set my light meter to ISO 100. Images from the lab were fine the highlight details where the sun was hitting was a bit too bright but the skintones I couldn't tell them apart. It could also be how they handled the scans for me. I did a 3 stop overexposure for a night cityscape and that came out ok as well ...

With slides and long exposures, Provia 100F has great reciprocity properties ... Can't overexpose it though ... ;-)
 

Les Sarile

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rayonline_nz said:
Why did you had to use those long exposures? You could had used a shorter shutter speed right? Were you just out doing something and it was convenient to just leave the camera outside? Haha.
Click to expand...

Except possibly for the shot of the boat Marcella - maybe too subtle, I am not sure what you mean.

Perhaps these two different time exposures from Fuji 100 will be less subtle in showing what long exposures gives you. Obviously I could not have used shorter shutter speeds on these as in the others.



Of course they don't all have to be extremely long - as needed in totally dark nighttime settings, but just long enough to achieve the effect during daytime hours too like this many seconds long autoexposure shot on Fuji 100 . . .

 
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rayonline_nz

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Les Sarile said:
Except possibly for the shot of the boat Marcella - maybe too subtle, I am not sure what you mean.
Click to expand...

I can understand waterfall effect you get that with a deliberate long exposure. Regarding the night scene with the water building cityscape, Portra 800 and 15 minutes. You can get a similar look without such a long exposure right? Yes the water was smoothed out more but for a typical night scene of buildings. Eg .. if one was shooting slide film maybe something like Provia 100F which works up to 120 seconds officially without reciprocity. 120 seconds might be more than sufficient for a typical city night cityscape right?

Normal photography wisdom says. Shoot at box ISO speed, meter accurately and if required pop a 10 stop ND filter on.
 

YoIaMoNwater

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Ayyyy another LX user, with the FA-2 too! Nice setup as well.
 
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