New Portra 400... overexposed 5 stops?? ISO 12.5??

Hmmm.

So on one of our photowalks in Melbourne city, I incident metered for the shade, as most of my subject as in the shade and wanted to optimise exposure for my subject, this is an extra +5 stops compared to a subject in the sunlit areas... yet it handled this mixed shade/sun combination beautifully, and flattened out the lighting contrast and did not get too dense, tones are reproduced beautifull for subjects both in shade and sun, it handles such a extreme harsh contrast condition wonderfully.. I have midtones for both!

The New Portra 400.. it has fine grain.. it is very sharp, it has wonderful saturation, and a ton of local contrast snap, very good skin tones.. it is high speed.. it is pushable.. it handles overexposure, it retains highlights, it can compensate high contrast with increased exposure without pull-processing.. if you had to have only 1 colour film, this would be it, forget Ektar, you can do everything with this.

If I was shooting for the sunlit area.. you would call this an EI of 12.5! This isn't a pull-process either, it is standard.

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Portra 400 pushed to 1600

New Portra 400 pushed to 1600.. that's 4 minutes 15 seconds in C-41 developer :)

This new film is beautiful and it handles excellent at 1600.. as long as you push it though!

Though there is invariably going to be a couple of times when a bit of underexposure will be introduced, so perhaps a push to 3200, but using an EI of 1600 for exposure would be best, or push to 1600 with an EI of 1250 or 1000 even better.

Portra 400 @ 1600

 

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Portra 400 pushed to 25600

Pushed 6 stops. 7 minutes and 30 seconds processing time in Flexicolor C-41 at 39 degrees celsius.

Density range is thin, image is poor, and lots of scanner noise present. It's at this point several things spring to mind:

1. Use a fast lens to begin with (well I just need the $ for that Mamiya 645 80mm f/1.9!)
2. It's at this point, the mercury vapour and hydrogen peroxide latensification looks attractive.
3. Perhaps a tiny pre-flash.
4. A "pre-developer" if you will for about 1 minute or so, phenidone-ascorbic acid speed enhancing developer, long enough to begin to have action, without making a visible image, just to amplify the silver image a bit, in case C-41 can't discern as low intensity sites as a speed enhancing b&w dev can. Which then can be then processed through C-41 after.
5. Rehal processing, after bleaching, instead of fixing, run it through C-41 again to increase dye gain.
6. Combine hydrogen peroxide with a colour developer or C-41 during development to gain more dye yield.
7. Combine points 2 through 6.

Anyway, here is one of the images, probably the best off the roll. I do not recommend this. A push to 6400 might be doable to a good quality, the 3200 results I've seen online are quite good, I think a push to 6400, but shot with an EI of 3200 might be best though.

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