More Portra 400BW examples (night shot 35mm, day shot MF)
2003-05-20 by Anthony Atkielski
This example was shot at night, handheld, on 35mm Kodak Portra 400BW: http://www.mxsmanic.com/artists.jpg The real-world scene was very dimly lit, and had a lot of contrast between areas lit by streetlamps and the relative darkness in between. I was not optimistic about getting a decent shot, but the film performed beyond my expectations. What amazed me when I looked at this photo was how well Portra caught it all. I did notice a diversity of light sources in the original scene, which is one reason why I took the shot (while it was all dim, there was no point completely devoid of at least a bit of light), but I never expected this film to record so much highlight and shadow detail. It was quite a pleasant surprise. In fact, the final image looks almost as if it were artificially lit for the purpose of the shot, but it wasn't. Note that this was shot with a very wide aperture, around f/1.2-f/1.4, I think, which helped eliminate camera shake. The original scan is about nine times larger than this 1.2 MB image. It's really getting to the point that Portra 400BW may simply be my preferred B&W night film. It still seems a bit flat for daytime use, although I'll use it when I require very fine grain. I don't think I've posted the MF shot below yet: http://www.mxsmanic.com/salute.jpg full image, reduced (0.6 MB) http://www.mxsmanic.com/salute1.jpg excerpt at 100% of original scan size (0.2 MB) This person wanted me to take a picture of him, "as a souvenir," so I did. Shot on an overcast day, at around f/5.6 or f/4, I think. This was handheld, but the film speed helped. This image, like many Portra daytime images (particularly in shade), seemed a bit flat. I hiked curves in Photoshop in certain areas to force more detail out of the image (see the excerpt in the second image). Since I was spreading a very small range of tones over a very wide area, there is some clumpy graininess in the areas where I did it. Despite my adjustments, you can see that the image still doesn't "pop" the way a lot of conventional B&W films will. I'm sure Portra accurately recorded the true relative luminosities in the scene, but that's just what makes grayscaled color look flat. If I could just have my hypothetical Portra Tri-X, with Tri-X looks but the Portra lack of grain, this shot would have looked a lot better. About the best thing I could say here is that at least with Portra I can crop and crop and still not have too much grain.