 Piper Lehman |
Best Film For Night-Tme Cityscapes Was wondering if anyone had a favorite film type/brand/speed, etc., that they like to use when shooting night-time/dusk cityscapes/lights. Should I stick with Velvia, or is there another favorite out there I don't know about?
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Romen Vargas |
Hi Piper, I love shooting night shots and when I do I tend to use Negative film for the exposure latitude. I use Kodak Portra 160NC... most people think Portra is just for portraits but it works quite good with landscapes and nightscapes as well. I print up to 16x12" and I don't notice any grain either. The colours are not overdone and look more natural in my opinion using this film. But since you use Velvia I might assume that you like really rich colours in which case try Agfa Ultra 50 (another negative film).
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John A. Lind |
Piper, Most night cityscapes are basically monochromatic and lacking in very much color unless you're in an area such as the Las Vegas strip or a few cities in the Far East loaded with colored neon lights. For the average city, the lights inside buildings (that you see through windows) are fluorescent (greenish) and many street lights are sodium vapor (yellowish). Buildings and other regions not directly lit by night area lighting will be very dark. Two biggest considerations I've found in shooting night cityscapes: (a) lighting is not daylight. If its not brightly colored lights, color balance will have to be done when making prints. One exception is tungsten balanced lighting, or something close to it, sometimes found in old historically restored areas of large cities with very old style street lighting. In these cases, you can try tungsten balanced film, but it requires experimentation to see how well it does or does not work. (b) Contrast levels will be very, very high between lights within the image, areas very directly lighted by them and regions not directly lighted. As with Romen, I've had good luck with Portra 160, both NC and VC. It has a very wide latitude and restrained saturation that helps with color balancing in making the prints. Unless you're working with scenes containing very boldly colored lights, high saturation films will likely be more problematic with color balancing the prints. I have also used Ektachrome 160T, a tungsten balanced slide film for street Christamas lighting, and that has generally worked well. Nearly all colored Christmas lights are incandescent (tungsten filaments). The only problem has been in scenes with a heavy mix of the Christmas lights and normal street lighting. When doing this I try to compose it to minimize the type of lighting in the images and keep it as much the Christmas lights as possible. -- John
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