Which colour Negative/Transparency for 5x4?

[Messiah Khan]

Well I am now the proud owner of a Wista 45SP;

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=168734


But what should I put through it? It will be my first time with film and I'm probably going to mainly be shooting Landscapes/Seascapes. The final results will be scanned in on a Hasselblad X1, fiddled with in Photoshop and outputted to a large format printer. Any suggestions for a good landscape Negative/Transparency that is quite forgiving (until I get used to the setup) but will also scan well?

 

[joxby]

colour neg has better latitude than slide.
unfortunately, Velvia 100f isn't colour neg, but that's my pick.....



*edit*

I should say why, well first of all its bladdy beautiful, and second it has a later reciprocity failure level and resistance to colour casts compared with velvia 50, which may or may not be an issue on 5x4 but is more likely than 6x6, and third its bladdy beautiful...

 

[Gandhi]

Congratulations! You wont look back, trust me. As long as you can reconcile the fact that what you produce will be nothing like you've ever produced on digital. There will be no use of HDR and subtle use of shadow recovery tools etc.

Start with B&W and dev yourself. 50p a sheet is a lot more palatable than the £5 a sheet it will cost to purchase/dev each sheet of E6/C41. At least until you have a grasp of the focussing and all the other things that can go wrong.

Loads of useful info here and on the related forum too.

Oh, and take film out of the darkslide for developing. Wait til you have an emoty box, or see if you can scrounge one off the lab you are going to be your developing.

Oh, plenty of LF'ers on here, so if you need anything, just ask.

Oh, and using the d300 as a spot meter will be fine as long as you dont mind carrying the extra weight.

Large format is good enough to stop me wanting to use digital ever again for landscape stuff.

 

[Messiah Khan]

colour neg has better latitude than slide.
unfortunately, Velvia 100f isn't colour neg, but that's my pick.....



*edit*

I should say why, well first of all its bladdy beautiful, and second it has a later reciprocity failure level and resistance to colour casts compared with velvia 50, which may or may not be an issue on 5x4 but is more likely than 6x6, and third its bladdy beautiful...

Thanks for the suggestion. So one vote for Velvia 100f. Any more suggestions? (Infact open it up to B&W suggestions as well)

*snip*

Thanks a lot for that information. So your vote goes with B&W. Any suggestions for a very fine grained film? I might try developing it myself, although that would be entirely new to me as well, so I would like to learn the new skills one at a time. Ultimately I would like to use this camera for long exposure seascapes, so I suppose I should get used to B&W.

 

[Gandhi]

Long exposure seascapes are perfectly achievable with both colour and B&W films. I'd probably go for Fuji Provia or Velvia 100f as they have the better reciprocity response. Not sure about c41 as I've never bothered with it.

Adox CHS 25 for the ultimate in fine grain. Its cheap too, 50 Sheets for £25!! Makes nice creamy seas very possible with apertures as small as f45 I know people will moan about defraction at that size aperture but unless you are printing 6 foot prints, it wont be noticeable.

B&W dev at home is really simple, not particularly temperature dependant and very customisable. Its also cheap as chips if you use a highly concentrated dev like rodinal or HC -110.

Any more questions?

Its strange how the upsurgance of LF has started to blossom again. I'm off to buy lots of cheap secondhand kit before the prices get overinflated

Having said that though, it depends on how big you'll print, but normal size enlargements wont tend to exhibit grain even up to ISO 400 if you use a softer working dev.

 

[Messiah Khan]

The Adox CHS 25 looks interesting. Might have to pick up a box of that. Will probably also pick up a box of velvia for colour work as I have had several suggestions for that.

I'm planning on scanning the images in, then printing them out at up to 40"x50". so it needs to be able to handle a certain amount of enlargement. I actually have access to a fully working darkroom here at work, so I don't really have an excuse as to not develop B&W stuff myself, other than wanting to take it one step at a time.

Oh, and as for long exposures; My B&W 10-Stop should help things along nicely. What sort of aperture range should I be looking at for maximum sharpness with LF lenses?

 

[joxby]

Oh, and as for long exposures; My B&W 10-Stop should help things along nicely. What sort of aperture range should I be looking at for maximum sharpness with LF lenses?

Dunno how useful a 10 stop will be on 5x4.
Depends on what you are shooting, obviously dof at f8 on 5x4 doesn't look anything like f8 on small format, but aperture is only a small part of the story, you can get everything from a meter to infinity in focus just by using the movements, which is more reason than than anything to shoot 5x4 in the first place.
I've never shot 5x4 personally, but I've assisted and besides the basic principles of photography everything else related to small formats gets chucked in the not relevant bin.
If I ever shoot it, I'm gonna sit down and try to forget everything, cos it just gets in the way......

 

[Gandhi]

10 stop will be useful, but it will create a whole world of pain with reciprocity failure calculations. Maximum sharpness will be around f11-f22.

If you are going to be printing that large, then you probably want to look at a PMT scan as opposed to a ccd one, even from a scanner as good as the flextight/x1. You will also need to make sure that focus is critically accurate, there is no vibration etc. The level of detail will still blow you away though!

 

[Messiah Khan]

I realise I will need to factor in reciprocity failure calculations with long exposure stuff. I'm going to take it one step at a time, but the long exposure stuff is what I want to be playing with eventually, and experimenting and playing around is half the fun.

I will definitely be using the X1 as it is just outside my office and under my control here at work, so the convenience is hard to resist. I also know it is up to the job as several of the students have shot 5x4, scanned it in on the X1 and printed out very large. One thing one of them suffered from though was diffraction as he had stopped right down. So this is something I want to avoid.

 

[CT]

I'd have to suggest Provia 100F for long exposures. Provia claim 3 minutes before you need to think aboiut reciprocity failure, and if you do a search you'll find users who claim you can get away with longer than that.