Don’t Use Consumer Film
Posted by sepial at July 14th, 2006
Now that most people use digital cameras, it’s getting harder and harder to buy film in high-street shops anyway, but the stuff that is for sale at an airport or chemist’s shop or supermarket usually has three things wrong with it: it’s overpriced, it’s not fast enough (usually the speed is 200ASA), and the colour is over-the-top.
I don’t use consumer stock for weddings so I’ve illustrated this post with a family snap showing the intense saturation of conventional 200ASA colour film. Because the colours of my niece’s eyes and my mother’s skin and clothing are so strong anyway this shot worked. [One advantage of using such slow film, however, is that the original is a lot sharper than this thumbnail---you can click the compressed image above to see a slightly higher-res scan.]
However, normally, northern European flesh draped in the subdued greys and ivories of wedding dress benefits from the much milder tones of black-and-white or colour portrait film. I use Kodak Portra NC 400 or Fuji Pro 400H colour films and Kodak BW400CN and Fuji NEOPAN 400CN black-and-white. These latter two monochrome films are very handy because they can be developed in conventional colour processors. Even so, you should ask for the results to be printed onto black-and-white paper if you can because it has finer grain and won’t come out of the lab with the slight cast that you usually find when your negatives are printed onto colour paper. (Though you might want a sepia tone to your prints of course.)
400ASA film is so much better for candids as it allows you to use faster shutter speeds and/or work in lower light. These days it’s so much finer grained than it used to be that older photographers’s prejudices against such fast stock can safely be ignored. Even at its worst it has higher resolution than all but the very best digital sensors. It’s ironic that, as digital is taking over, film technology has become so refined that, even on a rainy day, 400 film can take live action pictures as sharp and warm as this one.
[All of the above advice assumes that you have at least one decent lens on your camera and are taking photographs of humans rather than buildings or landscapes.]