 Nancy J. Mazzie |
The Need For Fast Fine Grain I'm in need of a rather fast yet fine grain film for a current working situation. I'm doing historical documentation for special events and rentals at a planetarium. Most of the events are held outside the facility at night, in very low light situations. I've tried some of the faster reversal and negative films, but have not been happy with final 8X10 print quality. Any suggestions or favorite brands I should take a look at? Any new and amazing films on the market? Thanks for the help!
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William G. Lucrisia Jr. |
Hello Nancy, I used Ilford's 3200 (B&W 120) this past weekend on a very low light situation. If black and white is an interest to you, I achieved some very fine results. I used Kodak's D-76 developer, yet Ilford also makes recommendations for achieving the best results with their products. You never specified whether it was color or B&W film. I just felt like sharing that I was very happy with Ilford's 3200.
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Nancy J. Mazzie |
Thank you William, I will try the Ilford for my personal photography, but I was actually looking for a suitable color film for my work at the planetarium. As an added tidbit for anyone else that might have information for me, I'm using a Nikon N90 with flash. I'm unable to set up any additional lighting sources. The available lighting is subdued landscape lighting surrounding the building and a few sporadic low-level floods. Thanks again to anyone that can help.
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Morgan W. Bird |
I haven't tried it or seen it for sale anywhere yet, but Kodak has a new 800 ISO film in it's Portra line. It's moderately fast and is supposed to be pretty fine grain.
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John A. Lind |
Nancy, I checked Kodak's web site and read the data sheets on all their high speed color negative films. Finding a high speed, fine grained color film is not going to be easy, if it exists at all. Unfortunately Kodak quit using rms granularity like other manufacturers making it impossible to compare to Fuji or Agfa films! Kodak now uses a "Print Grain Index" and its technical description defies translating this to an rms granularity. I too was curious about Kodak's new professional film line. Here's what I discovered about the grain of professional Portra 800 (replaced Pro 1000), the professional Supra 800 (replaced Ektapress PJ800 and Ektapress Plus 1600 PJC) and the consumer Max 800: Print Grain Index (35mm at 4.4x mag.): This was very interesting! Kodak defines a Print Grain Index of 25 as being the point at which grain first becomes discernable to the average person at the average viewing distance of 14 inches for a 4x6 print. The magnification of 4.4x for 35mm format translates to the equivalent of a 4x6 print. A lower Print Grain Index means finer grained. If I interpret this all correctly, they are all about the same with the consumer Max 800 edging out their professional ISO 800 color negative very, very slightly. -- John
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