Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 1:53 PM +0000 11/10/99, B. D. Colen wrote: >Help! As an almost exclusively B&W available light shooter I need some >technical advice - and it might be best to just Email me off-list to avoid >starting an endless thread/pissing contest.. :-) > >What is the "best" high-speed (400 to 800) color neg in terms of producing >the most realistic skin tones in a) florescent lighting; b) florescent and >incandescent mixed; c) florescent and daylight mixed. > >And, assuming that the colors will be off somewhat, how difficult is it to >have the skin tones corrected in printing by a custom lab? > >Thanks in advance for help with such a newbie kind of question, but my use >of color film has for the past 40 years pretty much been confined to either >straight daylight, or just taking "happy snaps" where I didn't care about >color balance, etc. I tend to use the Fuji professional neg film up to 400. The 4th layer technology introduced with Reala has been applied here as well, and seems to work. BTW, Reala is still available here in 35 and 120. Faster films have almost always been better with respect to mixed lighting than the slower films. Fuji NHG is also decent. Kodak 400VC seems OK, but I seems to get better results with the Fuji stuff. All these films can be balanced quite well in the lab. If you KNOW you will be shooting under something like standard warm white, or even moreso cool white, try to get a 30M filter on your lens. Cool white tubes in a hospital green setting will sometimes require 60M according to my color meter, and that gets hard for a photofinisher to do a good job on because of cross-over problems (you fix the highlights, and the shadows start going the other way). The other thing to watch out for is lighting direction. Try to get people in mainly one lighting (color) or another. It looks bad to have the important part of the face correct, and the other side strongly green or magenta. * Henning J. Wulff /|\ Wulff Photography & Design /###\ mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com |[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com