Printable View
I've to shoot an entire railway station, there's is a lot of different lights (w indows...), i think that fuji NPL and NPS are good for mixing lights, what about slides ? slides are easier for editing and scanning, i was going to use provia 100f, is i t a good choice ? thanks
With transparencies there is not much that is easy to do in mixed light situations. You can multiple expose using different filtration to correct each set of lights -- but that only works if you can completely control the lighting and turn off the other lights for the exposure the camera is filtered for. Or you can gel all of the lights to one standard color balance (in your case daylight). Neither solution sounds like it will be practical or economically sensible in your situation.
You can accept and learn to use the existing lighting as an aesthethic choice and abandon the idea of technical perfection (all lights balanced to one color range.
You can determine what the main two sources of lighting are (hopefully daylight and fluorescent) and make a split filtration decision and a bracket your filtration and exposures. If you are able it will be a good idea to test these combinations on 35mm first so you don't waste a lot of film
You can make your exposures and try to clean it up in Adobe Photoshop, This can be very, very time consuming and hence expensive (the high res scan will be the least of the cost here: time or skilled labor will be far and away the bulk of the expense).
Or you can shoot either NPL or NPS and have that scanned and have high quality Lightjet large format transparencies made of the cleaned up file.
provia 100F is an excellent choice. Ifthe bulk of the lighting in the place or at least the important bits are lit with tungsten, RTPII (64TII) will be a better choice.
A tricolor color meter (I like the Minolta Color Meter IIIF) is a necessary tool in these situations-- especially if you know how to use it and interpret its readings. It is actually very straight forward to use, but in mixed light situations you really have to think about what you want the final image to look like and filter the readings through your wetware.
This may sound simplistic, but shoot a few test sheets with 100F and use color balance and hue/saturation in PS to change or remove any unwanted color casts.
With some practice and patience I've found very little that cannot be color corrected in PS.
I have had GREAT results shooting interiors with multiple light sources shooting Reala. It has and additional layer of magenta in the emulsion to take the cast out of the flouro lights and even the tones out. To make your life easier, get a color corrected contact from a good pro lab. Shooting slides are great if you have a color meter and all the filtration you need but if your wanting to shoot slides for convenience sake... don't.
the best thing is to shoot tests on 35mm...if you can...as described above. but take care....often the light situation will change and it can happen that you will not realise this...( dimmers ...some lights are not working well one day later....and so on....). i have made very good experiences with provia and fluorescent lights and also.....with velvia. it shows very beautyfull color changes with tungsten light and fluorescent mixed...and with aperture 22 you nearly can not make thr exposure wrong/ the film slows down the lights drastically...aperture times will be between 180sec and 300 sec. beginning working with the color meter i made interesting mistakes....not being conscient of a.e. red colored floors and fluorescent lights.- in this specific case the floor was creating the half of the needed magenta filter.....and the minolta meter could not know this....and me i wondered about such a discrepancy between the meter and the results.....till i realised the reason.......