Can 400 iso film blow up real big, real well?

[kevs-2323668]

I just shot some Tmax 100 BW, full body portraits in a small studio, f/11 or f/16. My power pack is currently 400 watts.

Too much stuff out of focus.

I'm wondering if any of you have shot at 400 with 4x5 and blown up large (40 x 60) and have great results (as opposed to shooting at 100)

thanks, (curious on color experiences as well as BW)

[polyglot]

Depends how good you want it to look and which film you use. The answer is very different for Fomapan 400 and Tmax 400 ;)

I find that, in Xtol at least, TMY2 looks pretty good out to about 7x or 8x enlargement. HP5 starts to suffer around 5x, as does Fomapan 100. IMHO. If you're printing at 40x60, TMX will definitely look smoother than TMY but you may well decide that the small increase in grain is worth it to obtain the extra DOF, especially if you shoot it at EI800.

You might also want to consider more-efficient light modifiers or moving them closer to the subject.

As for colour, I find Portra 400 to be visibly coarser than TMY2. Not by much though. Portra 160 is lovely if you have the light; Ektar I wouldn't shoot portraits with because you get carrot-face.

[kevs-2323668]

Poly, for color I've only used Fuji RDP 100 and it came out great.

tmy2 is tri x 400?, what is 7x 8 enlargement in inches? What about Tmax 100 vs Tmax 400?

Hp5 is Ilford? so don't not blow up as good as Kodak? then why use it?

Good idea about shooting at 800, can go from f/ 8 to, 22 just by using different film, but when go big, and push, wonder if that will look bad? compared to straight tmax 100?

I'm shooting no diffusers for these projects.

[Brassai]

Are you shooting people or stationary things? I like to shoot BIG stuff, outdoors. I'm taking barns, elevators, railroad birdges. They don't move much. Some are not only big, they are far away. I have about 10,000ws but that's sometimes not enough. What I do is lock everything down tight on a tripod, and then make more than one pop on the flash. In effect, x3 pops gives me 30,000ws for example. Don't forget that light increases/decreases by square. I.e. to go from f5.6 to f8, you double the power. To go from f5.6 to f11, you quadruple.

[Robert Langham]

I've shot ISO 400 films for decades- either TX or HP5 to get a little extra speed for filters, small F-stop, et. They seem fine to me.

103214

103215

[Kodachrome25]

If you want clean as in no noise 40x60's use some form of digital, this is film we are talking about here and it has grain, even Tmax 100 at 60" would show grain although a lot less than most films. I have seen really powerful 40x60's from 35mm Tri-X from the likes of Eugene Richards, Salgado and Nachtwey that because of how good the actual photograph is, the grain did not matter.

I'm not saying you should shoot 35mm Delta 3200 and blow it up to 40x60 but TMY2 ( Tmax 400 ) should look great at 40x60 from a 4x5 neg....if the content of the photo dominates the reason it is that big, not the materials used. The grain of film is like grain in wood, why hide it when you could embrace it and make a powerful photograph on it?

Also, are you doing digi-prints or real darkroom prints, there is a marked difference in how the grain gets treated depending on that.

[Kodachrome25]

I've shot ISO 400 films for decades- either TX or HP5 to get a little extra speed for filters, small F-stop, et. They seem fine to me.

At 40 x 60"?
That is the thrust of the question...

[kevs-2323668]

THANKS, shooting people, and unfortunately people with grain does blow up as cool as landscape does, but this is good info.. thanks.

[electroliner]

Keep in mind the usual thing, that the bigger the print, the farther away the viewer is likely to be. If you stare at your 40x60 print from two feet away, it may look a little rough, but from a proper viewing distance of 15 or 20 feet, it may look just fine.

[Leigh]

400 will never be as good as 100, no matter what you do.

You know that.

It starts out better.

Any manipulation you do to improve 400 can do the same with 100.

- Leigh

[Leigh]

... the bigger the print, the farther away the viewer is likely to be.
If assumptions were dollars (or euros), we would have a very rich membership indeed.

Viewers will get as close to a print as they can without falling off of something or getting arrested.

- Leigh

[Kirk Gittings]

Yes Leigh. The myth of the standard viewing distance is just that.

[Peter Gomena]

Rent bigger lights!

[Daniel Stone]

Buy a box of each 400 speed film(Portra 400, Tmax 400, and Ilford HP5+), and do some testing.

Answers from others who merely show you a 60dpi web-sized srgb jpeg that's highly compressed will NOT show you what you need to hear/see. Only YOUR eyes and brain can make that decision based on what you see.

Buy some film and do some testing. What works for one person might be found despicable by another...

-Dan

[IanG]

The simple answer is that the advantage of the extra two stops of a 400 ISO emulsion will give you that increase in depth of field you require and the trade off is slightly more grain.

My own experience using HP5 is that 5x4 negatives stand up very well enlarged and shown alongside images shot on 100 ISO emulsions in my case Delta 100 (or APX100/Tmax100 in the past).

As has already been said you need to try it for yourself. I never considered using a fast emulsion (in LF) until I found I had no other option when shooting hand-held, but it works for me.

Ian

[polyglot]

Poly, for color I've only used Fuji RDP 100 and it came out great.

Sounds like you're scanning rather than optically printing then. That changes things somewhat because you will get grain aliasing in some situations that will make (some) grain look worse than it is. Depends on the scanner as to which films will be affected in which way.

If you liked RDP then you will be ecstatic with the resolution of Ektar, but the saturation & contrast are high if you're printing optically. It's fine if you scan it and adjust curves digitally though.

If you're scanning and care only about smoothness and not about resolution, then you can digitally erase (denoise) all of the grain from a faster film. Your print will be perfectly grain-free, just without quite as much fine detail as is present in a Tmax 100 shot.


tmy2 is tri x 400?, what is 7x 8 enlargement in inches? What about Tmax 100 vs Tmax 400?

TMY2 is Tmax 400. 8x enlargement means exactly that, the print is 8x larger than the negative. So for a 4x5", 8x enlargement is approximately 32x40" (with some variation because the active area of the film isn't really 4x5" and you also lose some space on the borders of your print). If you want a 60" print from 5" film, you need 12x enlargement.


Hp5 is Ilford? so don't not blow up as good as Kodak? then why use it?

HP5+ is somewhat similar to Tri-X (a traditional cubic-grain emulsion), which is not at all similar to Tmax (tabular grain emulsion). Ilford's competitors to Tmax are called Delta, but sadly you can't get Delta 400 in sheets.

People use them because they have a different look, a different H-D curve. Sometimes people also like to see a little more grain, or they're printing small enough (16x20") that there is no visible grain even from these coarser emulsions, and the look becomes more important.


Good idea about shooting at 800, can go from f/ 8 to, 22 just by using different film, but when go big, and push, wonder if that will look bad? compared to straight tmax 100?

I'm shooting no diffusers for these projects.

It will definitely look visibly grainier than Tmax 100. Shooting at 800 will give more contrast, but if you're expecting that then you can probably adjust your lighting ratios appropriately and keep it all well under control. I wouldn't hesitate (on technical grounds) to exhibit a big print from TMY2 though, it's about the best speed/grain tradeoff you are going to find. And it's all meaningless in the face of the quality of your image content.

You will have to test for yourself; no amount of handwaving on the internet can substitute for going out and exposing a few frames and printing them.

[RMiksell]

Have you considered using flashbulbs? A used grafllite flashgun can be had for a song on Ebay, and GE#5 bulbs can be found for less than $0.20 each if you buy in quantity. I've yet to have one fail to fire. Keeping shutter speeds less than 1/30th of a second shouldn't be an issue for portraiture. If you need more light just go for bigger bulbs. You'll need to calculate exposure from the guide numbers and maybe do a few test exposures to get a feel for working with the bulbs. I've also found the blue coated ones give excellent results for daylight balanced film as well if you're shooting color. You can also string 2 or more of the flashguns together if needed.

As for downsides, I haven't tried adapting them to light modifiers other than the standard reflectors yet, but you should be able to fit them into a softbox. Other downside is you need to change the bulb after each shot. Not really a big deal for large format, we tend to take our time with our shots anyways.

As for experience with 400 speed films and grain, I've shot TMY2, scanned at 4000dpi with 13um aperature, viewed at 100% grain is visible but very fine. Much finer the HP5 scanned at 2000 dpi. I haven't shot TMX yet so I'm not certain how it compares with that. I still have some efke ort 25 in 8x10 I want to test as well. I haven't attempted printing that large optically so I can't comment on that yet.


-Ryan