What colour film to use in bright sunshine?

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sidxms

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I've been having a play with Kodak ektar iso100 and apart from close ups for flowers, it seems to struggle with the colours a bit. I know films have a lower dynamic range but still.

Secondly, I'm finding that the scanned images from my F5 are pretty bright. Since I don't have prints, Its difficult to say what the problem it. Do people use a grey card for metering film? I get the feeling I'm doing something wrong here.

sid
 
Film has a wider dynamic range than digital, thats one of it's pain plus points. Ektar is a reasonably high saturation film so I dont know what you mean by struggling with the colours?

What I would say is to never underexpose negative film, you can get away with up to 2 stops over exposure with ektar and its still good.

Do you have an example of what you mean?
 
Well heres an example.

It was a good scene but a combination of scanning, manual focus and the film seem to have ruined it. Oh the joys of film!

img495copy.jpg
 
sidxms said:
I've been having a play with Kodak ektar iso100 and apart from close ups for flowers, it seems to struggle with the colours a bit. I know films have a lower dynamic range but still.
Click to expand...

Negative film has a larger dynamic range, not lower.

Ektar 100 is a great film but if you are finding the colours too saturated then something like Fuji Pro 160S or Kodak Portra 160NC may be more suitable.

I suspect your problems may be to do with the scanning though, not the film.


Steve.
 
That looks like a really bad scan, and possibly too overexposed, hard to tell.

Who is doing the scanning? If its from someone like Boots/Jessops they stick it on auto and if it falls outside the scan settings its tough.

The side of that building looks completely blown, which you really shouldn't be able to manage if you are even vaguely competent at taking pictures, the film should cover it for you.

Of course it could be a camera fault I suppose with a sticky shutter overexposing
 
raathistle said:
That looks like a really bad scan, and possibly too overexposed, hard to tell.

Who is doing the scanning? If its from someone like Boots/Jessops they stick it on auto and if it falls outside the scan settings its tough.

The side of that building looks completely blown, which you really shouldn't be able to manage if you are even vaguely competent at taking pictures, the film should cover it for you.

Of course it could be a camera fault I suppose with a sticky shutter overexposing
Click to expand...

I'm doing the scans myself with a epson v300. Its not the best and another problem I've noticed is that I get faint vertical/horizontal lines on the scan at high-ish dpi >1200 onwards. Is this a fault with the scanner or what?

Its difficult to tell just by looking at the neg whether its blown or not. I am shooting with high end kit here so know what I'm doing ( Nikon F5 + 50mm F1.2) . I recall spot metering the building so its not blown.

Finding it hard to pin it down atm.
 
Where in London are you? If you can get the negs to me (Leicester Square in the daytime or Willesden Green in the evenings) I'll stick them through the V700 and see if we can eliminate your scanner as the fault.
 
Did you get prints done at the same time as processing? I am assuming you didn't.

In future, it's worth getting a set of 6x4 prints so you can judge what is going on.

The auto settings nature of the print machines does tend to hide any minor exposure defects but if the results you are getting are not as good as the print then you will know that what you are doing is not quite right and that a better scan is possible.


Steve.
 
The shot has a pronounced green cast which is typical of what tends to happen with out of date film, although as Steve says, your scanner settings could be the cause of the problem. I've just set the colour temp to 6500K (Daylight).

3632490420_8cf521364e_o.jpg


Another vote here for Portra 160 NC or perhaps Provia 100F if there's plenty of light.

I wouldn't say it was blown. You're losing a bit of shadow detail, but any more exposure and you'd almost certainly blow the highlights, so I think it's about right in what looks like very contrasty light.
 
Hmm that looks much better CT, The epson scanner software is a bit hit and miss really.

You would think that If I metered for the house (which I'm sure I did) then there would be a bit more detail in the brick work. I didn't mind loosing the shadow detail.

sid
 
Have a look at your scanner software -see if you have a colour restore filter. The V700 has one and it does a good job of producing natural looking colour and getting rid of any casts, although in all honesty, I think setting the colour temp in post processing probably does a better job.
 
The faint lines do seem to be an issue with the scanner I'd say.
 
The scanner didn't make a good job in scanning, which happens at times and the shot just needs about 3mins in Photoshop to correct some of the faults...dunno what this looks like on your monitor but it looks presentable on mine.
Was the building that colour?:-

talkphot.jpg
 
The other issue we found was that there was something wrong with the cyan layer in the film, or at least both our scanners had the exact same issue with it.

Quick photoshop batch job to add +20 hue to cyan sorted that though.
 
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