New to M6: Are these underexposed? Or extra grainy?

[new-m-york-6]

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Hi,

I've been shooting with medium format for some time before picking up a Leica M6 TTL w/ a Summicron 35 ASPH. I'm not sure if I'm just used to the medium format but do these look exceptionally grainy to you? Shot with Portra 400 and was either metering the sky or shooting sunny 16. The split image shows how the lab scanned it (left) and how I tweaked the levels in Photoshop (right). FWIW, I was hoping to achieve a high contrast / dark shadow look. Thank you.

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[logan2z]

Did the lab charge you for those scans or were those low-resolution scans that were included free as part of the processing cost?  I ask because they look pretty crappy.  Do you have access to a decent scanner you can use to try and scan the film yourself?  

I don't shoot Portra 400 myself, but if you look at the images on the Portra 400 Flickr group I think you'll see that the film is not nearly as grainy as your scans make it appear.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/portra400/pool/with/48621887027/

[new-m-york-6]

1 hour ago, logan2z said:

Did the lab charge you for those scans or were those low-resolution scans that were included free as part of the processing cost?  I ask because they look pretty crappy.  Do you have access to a decent scanner you can use to try and scan the film yourself?  

I don't shoot Portra 400 myself, but if you look at the images on the Portra 400 Flickr group I think you'll see that the film is not nearly as grainy as your scans make it appear.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/portra400/pool/with/48621887027/

Yes they did charge. Scans come in around 9MB an image. The lab was very busy yesterday and they said scans would arrive on Monday. When it came that same day my first thought was they rushed it through somehow. I have an Epson 600, I'll scan some myself and compare and post a follow-up. Thanks.

 

[250swb]

I think these are crappy lab scans. I think they look over sharpened and that is why they look grainy, on the other hand I'd bet 99% of their customers need excessively sharpened photos and are happy. Image sharpening is a whole other world of banging your head against the desk for different films and personal preferences, the best thing to do is 'do it yourself' and don't have any sharpening or other corrections delivered from the basic scans.

[adan]

As to the grain - welcome to the world of ISO 400 color neg film. There is a reason ISO 50 Velvia slide film still exists.

As to exposure, well, the deep shadows are likely 5-6 stops darker in reality than the sunlit highlights.

As artist/photographer Ben Shahn was told when he borrowed a Leica from a friend in the 1930s, to work for the Farm Security Administration  - "f/16 on the sunny side of the street, f/3.5 on the shady side of the street, 1/125th of a second, and focus."

[andrew01]

Here’s a Portra 400 scan from the lab I use (AG photolab in UK).  Shot with a Leica R8 and 50mm Summicron.

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[BradS]

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On 9/13/2020 at 7:25 AM, new-m-york-6 said:

......Shot with Portra 400 and was either metering the sky or shooting sunny 16. .....FWIW, I was hoping to achieve a high contrast / dark shadow look. Thank you.

 

"metered the sky"  .....  that explains why they so underexposed....but it sounds like you understood what to expect in this case.

It's very hard to tell anything about the scan or really, anything else, without seeing the actual negatives.

[Ouroboros]

The negatives are underexposed and the lab have simply scanned them as they are, so the lab isn’t really to blame.

My advice would be to rethink your metering technique with Portra 400.  Metering for the highlights in outdoor scenes like this is not a good idea with any C41 negative film and Portra 400 has very forgiving highlight retention characteristics.

 

[250swb]

Portra 400 has such good highlight retention I often rate it at 200 ISO and meter for an average tone or the shadow. Portra 400 has almost legendary fine grain and definitely shouldn't be coming out as grainy as the OP's picture even as a 400 ISO colour film, more like andrew01's photo three posts up. I think for the high contrast look the OP is after a slide film would have been better. 

[Charles Morgan]

I'm happy to overexpose highlights with Portra up to 3 stops (not that I need to often here). This gives a far better chance of getting shadows exposed, and also less visible grain. It is a superb, forgiving, film. The meter in an M6 is simple - if you are metering the highlights, it will give the exposure for Zone V (18% greyscale) for the area around where you meter so in fact highlights will also be underexposed.

However, whatever exposure system you use, the reality is 35mm is more likely to show grain than medium format. Get everything right though and you will get results with Leica lenses not far off.