Preliminary test: new Kodak Portra 160
Just received my first rolls of the new Kodak Portra 160, and have the scans back from the lab. I took the boys to the zoo and figured it’d be a good time to a) test the new formulation of the film, and b) practice using my manual-focus 80mm f/1.9 lens on my Mamiya 645AF. Yes that’s right, f/1.9. You Contax 645 users and your measly f/2 lenses can eat my bokeh. My images are all 0.1 better than yours now. Hah!
But I digress.
The preliminary results look really nice! Because I wanted near-instant gratification, I took the film to my local lab to be scanned. They turned it around in two days, but unfortunately the scans don’t look as nice as the lab I use for my serious work (Richard Photo Lab in Los Angeles). They’ve been sharpened and there’s some jpg noise…so I can’t really comment on the grain structure compared to old 160 NC, or new 400 or whatever. So for now I’ll just have to say…hmm, very promising!
As we were eating lunch after our zoo visit, I remembered reading that Portra 160 could tolerate two stops under exposure. So I popped one frame at ISO 160 and another at ISO 400 (I know, only 1.3 stops underexposed). See the combined image below.
When I got the scans back, I couldn’t figure out which frame was underexposed! That’s a very good sign. I did finally figure it out, by putting the frames on a lightbox and noticing that the blown out window on one frame was slightly less dense than the other frame.
Note I was manually exposing here: since the scene was heavily backlit, I got a reading off my palm and opened up one stop, which yields roughly an 18% gray (for the ISO 160). This ensured proper exposure for the face in shadow. Since this was a fun trip, I didn’t want to bring a heavy medium-format camera AND a meter! Shutter speed was 1/125th at f/1.9. I then underexposed by bumping the shutter to 1/500th.
Can you tell which frame is the underexposed one?
It’s the second frame. Looks pretty darn good, eh? The first frame is out of focus because I was using a manual-focus f/1.9 lens, with very limited depth of field and a bouncing child. I will want to test this further, on stationary subjects.
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Film does have a better quality than digital. Not sure why, but it seems to have more depth than digital. Love this film
second frame? i am surprised:D
Excellent capture. Cool angle and great light
That kid looks very cute on those shots! You really have a knack in photography
great shot I like the shadowing from the light source