Dan Dozer
14-Sep-2004, 22:15
I just got may 4 x 5 transparancies back from the lab after a week in Zion National Park. This was my first try back into color work in many years. I Took some quickload Fuji Provia 100 to try out. For the most part, I was very pleased with the results. However, I did experience rather unplanned results in color shifts for longer exposures.
I spent one day in the slot canyons in the Narrows of the Virgin River. If you haven't ever been there, it's hundreds of feet of sheer cliffs straight up from a 20' wide (or less) river bed. Nearly all the light available is reflected light off the canyon walls. The rock is a combination of yelows, reds, and blacks and the effects are very dramatic. However, it's pretty dark in some places and longer exposures are many times required.
I have never really done much work in dark areas like this with exposures over one or two seconds. So without anything better to go with, I used a rule of thumb to double the meter reading for time and it seemed to work pretty well for final exposures. My exposures were up to about 8 seconds. However, the longer the exposure, the more the colors shifted towards violet. The brillient red cliffs are now a muted purple brown and the dark greys are now purple blacks. Obviously, this can be corrected in photoshop if I choose to go digital for printing. I assume that it can somewhat be corrected in the darkroom for traditional printing, but that would be pretty much trial and error (I used to do Cibachrome way back when).
As I said, this is my first time back with color in a long time and I've never used Fuji film before. My question is what do all of you "experts" out there plan for in this type of situation? Is there one type of film that you would recommend over others to limit this from happening? Do you try to use some sort of filtration in the field when the exposure is done to correct for it. If so, I would think that I would still get unpredictable results. I am extremely pleased with what I got back from my trip. However, I need to do something to correct for these color problems if I want to print any of them, and I would like to at least be able to plan for things like this in the future. One of my next trips that I would like to make is to the slot canyon in Page, Arizona. I've seem so many beautiful pictures of that area and wonder why I haven't read of similar problems there.
One other thing that I've wondered - the day I was there was a cloudless day with brillient blue skys. Perhaps I was getting a lot of reflected blue light down the canyon walls from the sky above.
Do any of you have advice or experienced similar problems?
Thanks
I spent one day in the slot canyons in the Narrows of the Virgin River. If you haven't ever been there, it's hundreds of feet of sheer cliffs straight up from a 20' wide (or less) river bed. Nearly all the light available is reflected light off the canyon walls. The rock is a combination of yelows, reds, and blacks and the effects are very dramatic. However, it's pretty dark in some places and longer exposures are many times required.
I have never really done much work in dark areas like this with exposures over one or two seconds. So without anything better to go with, I used a rule of thumb to double the meter reading for time and it seemed to work pretty well for final exposures. My exposures were up to about 8 seconds. However, the longer the exposure, the more the colors shifted towards violet. The brillient red cliffs are now a muted purple brown and the dark greys are now purple blacks. Obviously, this can be corrected in photoshop if I choose to go digital for printing. I assume that it can somewhat be corrected in the darkroom for traditional printing, but that would be pretty much trial and error (I used to do Cibachrome way back when).
As I said, this is my first time back with color in a long time and I've never used Fuji film before. My question is what do all of you "experts" out there plan for in this type of situation? Is there one type of film that you would recommend over others to limit this from happening? Do you try to use some sort of filtration in the field when the exposure is done to correct for it. If so, I would think that I would still get unpredictable results. I am extremely pleased with what I got back from my trip. However, I need to do something to correct for these color problems if I want to print any of them, and I would like to at least be able to plan for things like this in the future. One of my next trips that I would like to make is to the slot canyon in Page, Arizona. I've seem so many beautiful pictures of that area and wonder why I haven't read of similar problems there.
One other thing that I've wondered - the day I was there was a cloudless day with brillient blue skys. Perhaps I was getting a lot of reflected blue light down the canyon walls from the sky above.
Do any of you have advice or experienced similar problems?
Thanks