SolveYourProblem.com
Article Series: Photography Tips
I Want Some Photography Tips and Ideas
Which
Brand Has The Best Quality Roll of Film?
In choosing a film, you have to decide what
type, speed, and roll length you want. But you also have
to make one more decision: which brand to buy. Film manufacturers
compete aggressively, and the results have been very, very
good for photography - to the extent that truly bad films
are few and far between.
In fact, film manufacturers hold endless focus groups to
figure out what their customers look for in a film. Those
qualities seem obvious enough. People want their pictures
to be sharp, brightly colored, as detailed as possible, and
to have realistic skin tones. Getting all those features
in a single film is not easy, but current color print films
- especially the fast ISO 400 and ISO 800 films - come pretty
darn close.
In the past, different manufacturers' film tended to have
different personalities - to render color and detail in visually
distinctive ways. Modern film technology has minimized those
differences, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Those
differences in color and detail are more evident in slide
films than color print films, but it's still worth experimenting
with various brands of print film to see whether one in particular
gives you results that are more to your taste. For most purposes,
you'll probably find little visible difference in sharpness
or graininess between one maker's film of a particular speed
and type and another's. Where you may see subtle differences,
however, is in the films' contrast or color saturation.
What
is contrast?
Contrast
refers to the tonal scale of a photographic image - specifically,
the difference between
light and dark values. That difference is easier to discern
in black and white than in color, though you may see it
especially in the ability of a film to render textures.
But color saturation
- the overall intensity with which a film renders color
- is another story. Some films appear to produce redder
reds,
greener greens, and bluer blues than other films and are
said to have higher color saturation. It sounds great,
but higher saturation can come at the expense of a loss
of texture
and detail in brightly colored areas, and it may even cause
an unattractive ruddiness in skin tones. Color saturation,
the sense of texture, and the fidelity of skin tones are
important qualities to evaluate in your pictures. Because
they're more variable than graininess and sharpness, they're
really more important.
How
do I know what brands work best for me?
Simple:
Buy two short (12-exposure for 35mm, 15-exposure for APS)
rolls
of ISO 400 print film, each a different brand. Load one
and do your usual all-around shooting, saving the last
few frames.
For those frames, choose a subject that has a variety of
colors, tones, and textures. If you like, choose two subjects
close by - one for a shot with flash, one for without.
(Throw in a person for some skin tones.) Shoot the subject(s)
with
the last few frames of the roll. Immediately load the other roll and shoot the same subject(s).
You can even put a card in each shot with the film brand
written on it, so you don't have to look at negative strips
to get that information. Have your usual photo-finisher process
and print both rolls, and then compare the prints from each.
Do you like one better than the other? If so, then stick
with that brand - but just to be fair, periodically shoot
another brand to confirm your preference!
What
about Premium films?
If
you buy your film at photo shops rather than in drugstores
and supermarkets, you may
have noticed that the big-brand films sometimes come in
premium versions. Kodak has Royal Gold film in addition
to its standard
Gold line, for instance. Available in more or less the
same choice of speeds as the standard line, premium films
are
often marketed as special-purpose or special-occasion films
- films for once-in-a-lifetime sorts of pictures. Suspicious
consumers may dismiss premium film as a marketing scam,
but it really isn't. Real differences exist between a given
maker's
premium and standard films. The question, as usual, is
whether you can see those differences.
#
# # # #
SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
> Home
Page > Photography Tips:
Main Page
|