This is not to nitpick, but your summary just didn't match my own experience at all. Back in the 1990s, our family switched from shooting slides to color negative because ...well, long story, but we wanted prints. Immediately, everything went grainy as heck. We used to project slides a couple of ft. across without very apparent grain and now we were looking at 5x7" prints that were decidedly grainy.
Also slide had, a somewhat deserved, reputation of keeping colour better over time.
My question: what reading should i get when spot metering (film plane) on the LED lights on the floor?
Off on a slight tangent, but what are current estimates for C41 negative durability? Eg are you aware of any figures describing time before fading starts, in average temp/humidity storage scenarios?
The reading that gives you the result you want.
That probably sounds flippant, but it wasn't intended to.
Spot meters aren't really designed for reading the light being emitted by a light source. They are designed for reading the luminance of light reflected off a subject.
The intention being that you take that reading and then adjust it, depending on what tone you intend the subject to have in the final print or screen image.
Guys, i want to re-take my test shot tomorrow and to try and get a exposure better.
Please take a look at the first version below.
I'll get my middle grey reading from a grey card placed on top, but it's be roughly equivalent to the brushed silver / bronze top of the R2R machine.
I'm shooting Ektachrome 100.
My question: what reading should i get when spot metering (film plane) on the LED lights on the floor? I mean in relation to my middle grey reading. Their brightness is freely adjustable via an iphone app so i can dial them in just right.
In the version below i had them much too bright compared to the rest of the scene, so after increasing the exposure in post to correct my original under-exposure, they became all washed out.
In the 80's & 90's i think a lot of neon tubes were used in advertising so there must have been a rule of thumb for their exposure value to get the most vibrant colors from them?
Thanks!
View attachment 354292
Not flippant, but a little circular! Just kidding!
I don't see what difference it makes if the light is reflected or emissive, light is light when it arrives at the film plane, right? Not trying be argumentative, please correct me if i'm wrong!
the slide films were also of much better grain and so on compared to the colour Negative films of the day.
When I joined Photrio I think the first thread I posted was the question: why do slide films deliver finer grain than a color negative film of comparable speed?
Nearly all answers fell into these two buckets:
1. They don't. Provia 100 and E100 aren't finer grained than Ektar.
2. We don't know whether it's true.
And yet again... I see several claims that slides are finer grained.
I don't see what difference it makes if the light is reflected or emissive, light is light when it arrives at the film plane, right?
This is especially try with narrow-band light sources like LEDs which may interact with the spectral sensitivity of the film and the light meter in unanticipated ways. When shooting slide film, you may end up being slightly off as a result. But I wouldn't worry about it too much.The challenge with a light source within the frame is that it is difficult to visualize how it is supposed to look in the final result.
what reading should i get when spot metering (film plane) on the LED lights on the floor?
I'll get my middle grey reading from a grey card placed on top, but it's be roughly equivalent to the brushed silver / bronze top of the R2R machine.
LEDs and real neon (or the other gases used in neon tubing) are very different light sources. Neon is much more spiky in its spectrum.
One of the advantages of using transparency film, was colour accuracy. We did a real lot of product photography, 14 studios with often two photographers per studio, going hammer and tongs day in day out.
The film we used almost exclusively was Kodak EPN, which if my memory is correct, was designed to render colour as the human eye sees it. Most of our film was with medium format cameras, Hasselblad, Mamiya RB67 and eventually and thankfully Mamiya RZ67 with motor drive.
Apart from the fact the negative size was slightly different between the Hasselblad and Mamiya systems, 6x6 versus 6x7, there was a distinct contrast difference between the two manufacturers. The Mamiya lenses were slightly contrastier than the Hasselblad and dependent upon the product being photographed, the camera system lenses could be the decider of which one was to be used.
It was fairly common to use the flatter Hasselblad lenses to photograph fluffy white towels using a three and a half stop highlight to shadow subject brightness range. The exposure used was designed to make the transparency slightly too dark, then we would develop the film with a half stop push process to give a contrast kick to the final transparency. They made white fluffy towels look positively brilliant, yet at the same time held highlight and shadow detail wonderfully.
Doing stuff like that was only possible using transparency film and viewing the film on colour corrected light boxes with shrouds that eliminated room lighting.
For fashion photography, although we didn't do that much, we had had one very large studio running fashion stuff. For those we used the brilliant Rolleiflex 6000 series with motordrives and almost every conceivable aid a fashion photographer could wish for. The Rollei lenses were stunning and seemed to be a combination of Hasselblad flatness and Mamiya's contrast rolled into one beautiful range of lenses. Rollei transparencys when on the light boxes had their particular look, we often drooled over them.
One important aspect of transparency film usage, was with colour correction (CC) filters. You were able to use a certain CC filter and see the difference on the lightbox. However if you used a CC on a colour negative film, the CC filter effect would invariably be negated in the printing process.
Transparency film was king for almost all types of professional photography because the advertising directors, or whomever, would okay lightbox seen frames for reproduction immediately.
We used colour negative film for anything where the colour balance couldn't be controlled, or if a mural sized print was required. We made mural prints 1.8m high by 6m wide and often spliced these prints to mage billboard sized mural prints. Literally sewing them together using sailboat sail making techniques and machinery.
Colored LEDs are also very 'spiky', i.e. narrow-band emitters. For photography, they're quite equivalent to neon. LEDs are just easier to adjust. The caveat is that dimmable colored LEDs tend to be PWM-ed and this can result in problems with short shutter speeds and low PWM frequencies. Sadly this is difficult to predict. With longer shutter speeds (1/25 and longer) it shouldn't be a problem.
White LEDs are a different story. White LEDs and colored LEDs should be considered separately, with white LEDs being more of a mixture of LEDs and fluorescents.
Ah-ha, so it was also for the convenience of the people downstream in the chain, to easily and quickly view the image with the correct color.
Perhaps silly question: is there no way to optically view a negative with the correct colors, other than be printing through color filters in an enlarger? (i'm talking pre-digital)
Indeed, with color emulsions, what we see is NOT 'grain' because the grains are dissolved away during processing. What we perceive are the dye clouds that cluster around the grain site, and the dyes can 'clump' visually because they exist in 3-D space that may overlap one another visually.reddesert said:I think the perceived graininess of slide vs negative film probably has something to do with whether you're seeing grain (or its descendant dye clouds) structure in the highlights vs in the shadows
Subsidiary topic : chrome duplicates. Well, I know how to make very precise ones, almost indistinguishable from the original, were it not for the fact I went that route in order to incorporate all the contrast and hue corrections within the second version, making it a precision copy which was more printable.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?