Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
What counts with color film is not abstract tonality - shades of gray as in black and white, but what kind of hue reproduction you are after. Traqnsparency film is easier because after it's developed, you can simply slap it on a lightbox and immediately see if you're in the ballpark or not. Color neg film requires
either printing or scanning to get to that point. But either way, it still takes some experience to learn what kind of exposure leads to an articulate print
containing the colors you had in mind. At a certain point, those of us who routinely shot chrome film simply subconsciously gravitated towards friendly moderate-contrast scenes, or else intuitively knew what we could sacrifice, typically deep shadows. There are not many slide films left. Provia is good
from around Z III to VII; but that doesn't mean you'll get good color over that entire range. Pan F is an example of a black and white film with a similarly
limited dynamic range. Most popular black and white films stretch from II to VIII, and a few specialized ones well past that, even from I to XII. I am referring to this in terms of their native scale, and not to "minus" or compensating development tricks which compress the subject illuminance range at the
expense of intermediate tonality. Since hue reproduction is a non-issue in black and white work, you can get away with all kinds of things you can't in color.
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