Interior-exterior colour film

[Annibale G.]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Hello,

could you suggest me a colour film that works well either in interior and exterior with no flash and no filter,(maybe a little flash in interior shot)

Thanks awfully.

[tgray]

There's no perfect solution. Indoors is often dark and 800 speed film helps. Outdoors, 800 might be a bit fast. Depending on your lighting, 400 speed film might be fine.

 

All color film currently being made is daylight balanced, so you are most likely going to have to deal with some color casts shooting indoors with tungsten balanced lighting. That being said, as long as your exposures are good, modern films color correct pretty well in my experience. I assume you are scanning.

 

I would go with Kodak Portra 800 or Fuji 800Z. I prefer the Portra. Some people give the Fuji the edge with mixed lighting, but I've also seen people recommend the Kodak over the Fuji for the same reasons. Portra seems to be faster as well. It's been revised twice over the past couple years, so take recommendations with a grain of salt; they might be based on 2005 versions of the films.

 

If 400 speed is sufficient, again, I love Portra 400NC and 400VC. The NC is less saturated. Both were upgraded recently, and are now on version 3. The following photo was taken on 400NC-3 under tungsten lighting. I didn't even bother correcting for the color temperature difference because the lab scan corrections were good enough for the purposes of posting on flickr.

 

 

Here's a shot on Portra 800 with some bounce flash if I recall:

[earleygallery]

To add to the above comments, indoors you will ideally need to use a colour correction filter, particularly if you are using slides. Corrections can also be applied at the printing stage. Also, if scanning and printing digitally you can make corrections in Photoshop, although I think it is best to do as much correction at the 'capture' stage in either case.

 

Obviously there is no correction for flash as such although you may want to balance the flash with ambient lighting. I tend to use a warm filter with direct flash as it's often too cold in colour temperature.

[tgray]

Ditto on what earley said. Just to clarify, the shots I posted had no color correction filters while shooting. You're best quality would be to use the correct color correction filter while shooting. It would probably be better to use a filter that only half corrects the color temperature and fix the other half in post than to not use a filter. But if you run some tests and find that you can color correct shots with no filters in Photoshop to your liking, you might be ok. And that will give you the fastest shooting ISOs.

 

Just don't underexpose. You'll get crummy, grainy, muddy shots then.

[Xmas]

Hello,

(maybe a little flash in interior shot)

.

 

If you are going to use flash then it would be very difficult to predict the mixed light sources, unless the flash dominated the interior lighting. If the room is sufficiently well lit from natural light then any film will be ok, the light from a flash and daylight is similar, if ou stay away from sunset/sunrise times.

 

You may want to bounce the light of the ceiling if it is white, or off a large reflector, you can get fold up reflectors, you can use a thyresistor/photocell flash to automate he exposure calculations more easily.

 

Noel

[alun]

I have always found that Fuji Superia (or Fuji Press if you can still find it) copes fine with all manner of lighting just as long as there is *some* natural light in the mix. Of course if you plan to use flash then pretty well anything will be OK.

[NZDavid]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Fuji 400H. Very good handling of mixed light sources, and surprisingly fine grain.

[rubenkok]

Hi,

KODAK PROFESSIONAL PORTRA Films are great

400 and 800 ISO

Kind regards,

Ruben

[Annibale G.]

thanks. Anyway I can also scan my film with a film scanner so... it would be good. Maybe I'll try the kodak ones

Annibale