From: "Sally Mack" : For those of you who use film, what do you use and why? What are your : favored shooting conditions and subjects? Have you tried a film that : you especially disliked? Why? films I like: Agfa optima for it's neutrality with colour rendition - no strong biases in any particular part of the spectrum, especially good for photographic artworks, medical images and the like where colour exaggeration is undesirable Agfa portrait for subdued colour and tonal range, for portraiture and effects. Konica VX100 for rendering subtle colours accurately in the blue/mauve part of the spectrum, especially good for flowers, certain art works, clothing etc. It's funny, but every now and then a non photographer WILL recognise that the mauve wedding dress looks blue in everyone elses photos ;-) Konica SRG160 for just about everything else. rich saturated colours without being too exaggerated. Fuji stocks (can't recall the last type or time I used them) for shooting landscapes with greenery here in Oz - the ONLY way to make most of our plants look green instead of a glaucus grey! Lighting conditions here are extremely contrasty.. Kodak Tmax 100 B&W (dev in Rodinal) for portraiture, Agfa APX100 for general shooting, Ilford FP4+ for metalwork, Kodak Technical Pan for landscapes, Kodak High Speed Positive Release film for making positives from negs, TMax 3200 for effects, stage shots, portraiture. Kodak lith film and Kodak High Speed Positive Release film for 'ye olde worlde' looking landscapes and portraits. Kodak HSIR for ghostly landscapes and forensic, Konica 750IR for non halating IR shots (tech pan also doubles for this) All b&w films dev'd in Rodinal for accutance and sharpness OR Ilfotech for smoothing the grain somewhat without sacrificing a great deal of sharpness. : The best way to determine the best film is to shoot a few test rolls but : I'd like a heads-up on anything really good or really bad. there really are NO bad films, you just need to know what they're best at. For example, I loathed Ilford FP4+ because of it's colour sensitivity - it didn't fit what I shot nor did it render the tones the way I wanted but one day I found it held magical properties when it comes to shooting silvery metalwork. engine blocks, aluminium etc.. For every other shooting condition it is the last film I'd use, for metalwork I think of no other stock :-) : I use Kodak's "new" Portra VC (Vivid Color) negative film, either 160 or : 400 ASA in my 35mm Nikon FM3a, which is totally manual. I use only : natural lighting and shoot "nature," often water, sticks, weeds, : whatever's where I'm shooting. (The websites : http://home.earthlink.net/~photographs.by.sally.mack/ and : http://home.earthlink.net/~photographs.by.sally.mack2/ show some of my : photos.) I just looked at the first image on the first page Sally, it's a 243x283 pixel image but your code has stretched the image to 560x367 rendering somewhat pixelated.. it's also 124kb in size (!) somewhat HUGE for an image this small. I stripped it of all the photoshop rubbish (non image data) and it's now 98kb but i'd suggest saving it with *some* compression (saved at 80%) leaving the image smaller (26kb) thus quicker to download and looking identical to the larger file. the image is also lacking in contrast - check it out with the histogram tool, it does the picture no justice. eeek! just looked at the cactus flowers! the one subtitled 'Of the three buds, this first one bloomed Saturday' is a 432x278 pixel image SQUASHED by your html code to be only 300x193 pixels, the image is cleaned of PS junk but *please* look at the histogram of this image, I'd suggest the scan was not performed well.. It's too hard to see what these might look like on film or RA4 paper from these scans, and judging from these images would be unfair. : I'm happy with the Portra VC film as long as the photos are printed by : an analog lab (digital labs turn the colors too bright and too hard, : garish). > the auto settings on most of the digi labs are generally set to produce the "best" possible, however (and this is a big however) anything varying from the 'norm' gets badly mistreated by those settings! : I'm wondering if anyone has particular recommendations, especially those : of you who use natural lighting outdoors. (Sorry, digital folks, I'm : not ready for that, yet.) Whatever you use & shoot with Sally, I'd strongly recommend spending a bit more time with your scanner and it's software (or dumping the software and using Vuescan) to try to get better from the film you've already shot. Images like these do not represent your images as well as they could and that's doing you a disservice. A final suggestion, rerate your neg films to increase the exposure a stop (or more, experiment first of course) to saturate the colours a bit more and to move your exposure a bity further away from the toe of the curve.. less visible grain that way too. k
