by Steve Meltzer

New Films Make Photography Easier

Lost in the marketing and promotion blitz for digital photography is the news that traditional film technology has improved by leaps and bounds. In all categories — black and white, color print and color slide films — there have been remarkable changes over the last couple of years.

A selection of new advances in film technology.

Chromogenic b&w films are big news

The big development in black and white film has been the new “chromogenic” films that can be processed in the same chemistry as color print film. Any one-hour color print lab can now machine-process black and white film and prints just the way they do color print film. This is a far cry from the labor-intensive “dip and dunk” manual processing required for traditional black and white film.

Kodak produces three of these convenient-to-process black and white films — TCN, Portra 400 B&W, and B&W Plus 400 — which retail for about $5 for a 24-exposure roll and $7 for 36 exposures.

Awesome new color print films are here

The new generation of color print films is, to put it mildly, awesome.

Fuji has introduced a line of print films that incorporate their new “4th layer” technology. Regular readers know that color films work by registering the components of color on three light sensitive layers in the film.

One layer records the yellow component of light, one the magenta and one the cyan.

Fuji’s fourth layer is designed to correct for mixed lighting situations. For example, suppose you are in a gallery and you photograph a piece of art that is illuminated by both window daylight and a tungsten floodlight. Regular color print films would mix these colors of light and produce mushy colors. Fuji 4th layer films actually correct for the tungsten and let the subject’s true colors emerge.

Portra films increase image usability

Another major change in color print film is Kodak’s Professional films Portra 106NC and 400NC, which have been optimized for scanning. While the best of the high-end digital cameras currently create 5-6 megabyte files of an image, a 35mm frame of Portra, when scanned, can create a 20-25 megabyte file. Optimization squeezes every bit of information out of the frame, increasing image usability.

New color films give finer, sharper images

For me, the most important change in color films has been new technologies that allow films to have finer grain, better resolution and higher sharpness at higher film speeds. Today’s new ISO200 speed films are also equivalent in image quality to their much slower ISO160 and ISO100 siblings.

Both Kodak and Fuji produce multiple films in each speed category ranging in price from $5.36 to $9.55.

Good films for photographing crafts at home

For crafts photography at home, Kodak Supra 400 Professional or Portra 400 films are great. Faster film means that for the same amount of lighting, you get a two-stop edge over ISO100 speed films. That allows you to use either shorter exposure times or smaller lens apertures for greater depth of field.

If you are using floodlights or any other kind of tungsten or quartz lights, it’s generally recommended that you use an 80A blue filter over your lens to cancel out the tungsten lamp’s “warmth” or yellow cast.

But if you have access to a good lab, you can actually shoot these new films without a correcting filter — at full speed — and have the lab “color balance” the prints during processing. Many labs, especially those that use new digital technology photo printers, can produce excellent prints this way.

Improvements for color slide films

For every roll of print film, I shoot 10 rolls of color transparency film, so I am very pleased with the improvements in the area of color slides.

Kodachrome was once the mainstay of Kodak’s color slide business. This beautiful, fine-grained film with won-derfully saturated colors was the benchmark for all other color films since the 1950s. Unfortunately, the film had two significant drawbacks — processing and speed.

RECOMMENDED PRINT AND SLIDE FILM FOR CRAFT PHOTOGRAPHY

•Print Film: Kodak Supra 400 Professional or Portra 400 • Slide Film: Fuji Provia 100F (also called RDP-III); Kodak Ektachrome 100 Professional; Kodak Elite Chrome 100

Today most color slide film uses standardized processing, E-6 chemistry, which can easily be done by hand or with simple processing machines.

For crafts photography, my current slide film of choice is Fuji Provia 100F (also called RDP-III). Fuji produces an “amateur” version of this film under the name Fujichrome Sensia 100 that sells for about $10 a roll. It is similar to Provia 100F in many ways but has slightly more contrast.

Several Kodak films are also perfectly good choices for craft photography. Films like Ektachrome 100 Professional ($14) and Elite Chrome 100 ($10) are also superb, although they exhibit a little less exposure latitude than Provia.

What intrigues me the most are the new ISO400 speed color slide films like Fuji Provia 400 F Professional, which have film grains and contrast almost equal to the ISO100 speed films of just a few years ago. The freedom and versatility of a fine-grained, color-saturated, 400-speed slide film is something that once was only a dream and now is almost a reality.