Filter for red objects using FP4

[bob carnie]

I recently photographed a series on Meat and Bones, and the red meat did not record as I like on the film, whether I straight processed or solarized the film , basically no detail.

What filter should one use to record detail in red objects, secondary question I will be using a Sinar and an old Century camera, I would prefer NOT to use the filter in front of
the lens, would Lee or Roscoe filters inside at the back end of the lens be an issue??
Where is the best location to place the filters?
I am using tungsten hot lights if that matter not strobe so the original light is warm.

thanks in advance

[koraks]

I would expect maximum texture with a filter at the opposite of the color spectrum. So a green or perhaps a blue filter. But meat already being somewhat unsavory in appearance (my opinion), it may push things too far. I guess...experiment, as always.

[LabRat]

I agree, try med/deep green... Will darken reds a bit, and lighter textures should lighten, as most standard B/W films have a green sensitivity peak, the green component in the light reflects off the lighter areas building density, so it kind of produces contrast by lightening the whiteish areas, in reverse of deepening the blue shadow areas like many filters... Interesting effect...

Steve K

[Doremus Scudder]

Bob,

Are you trying to lighten or darken the meat, or just get more texture. Red/Orange will lighten, green will darken. You might even try an 80B or similar to just convert your tungsten light to daylight. It should darken red too. If it's just the texture, then maybe glancing lighting would help.

As far as filters behind the lens: anything in the focused beam will change the plane of focus, so make sure to focus with the filter in place. Gels work well behind the lens, but a good coated glass filter will give good results too as long as the focus is accounted for.

Best,

Doremus

[bob carnie]

Hi Doremus

I am trying to get more detail . I am using raking light from the side . I think Red/Orange is more to my liking as right now when I print a t bone for example the bone has tons of detail but
the red meat just prints black so I want to lighten the red meat in the final print.

I am using two different cameras for this one lens is a 480mm on an old camera and the other is a 210mm on sinar I believe which would require two really expensive lens filters and hard to find.
I am leaning to lee or roscoe filters behind the lens or even large sheets in front of the light sources.

I will focus with filters in place thats a good tip.

Bob

Bob,

Are you trying to lighten or darken the meat, or just get more texture. Red/Orange will lighten, green will darken. You might even try an 80B or similar to just convert your tungsten light to daylight. It should darken red too. If it's just the texture, then maybe glancing lighting would help.

As far as filters behind the lens: anything in the focused beam will change the plane of focus, so make sure to focus with the filter in place. Gels work well behind the lens, but a good coated glass filter will give good results too as long as the focus is accounted for.

Best,

Doremus

[bob carnie]

151519151520

Here is two samples of where I am going.. Both cases the red meat is too dark and I want more detail.

[brucep]

Have you tried giving it an extra stop of exposure and cutting your development time by 15-20%

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[Mark Sampson]

Colors of low saturation are likely to be less affected by filters than you think. And of course 'red' meat is not actually a pure red like,say, a tomato or a Ferrari. I'd try a strong red filter, #25 or #29. But please post your results...

[bob carnie]

These are solarized in development so all bets are off.


Have you tried giving it an extra stop of exposure and cutting your development time by 15-20%

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[Drew Wiley]

Placing filters behind the lens is not going to help with sharpness. Otherwise, hot lights are relatively warm color balance, so the film sees red especially red.
Funny things also go on with meat due to the way hemoglobin handles light. An interesting effect of this is how meat counters use a special type of fluorescent
bulb that makes hemoglobin fluoresce, so that the meat looks really red and fresh under the lights. But then when you get home and unwrap the meat, it looks
gray and old. Welcome to Safeway! I really don't know what you're after. Just view through the filter first. A deep red filter might make it look almost white and
be counterproductive to showing details like fat, gristle, and bone. Let's see... what was that cookbook Hannibal Lecter used?

[Drew Wiley]

There's one old trick I forgot. Food photographers sometimes paint things like this with glycerin in order to bring highlight reflections out, which would be one way
of accentuating surface detail in glancing light.

[RSalles]

Bob,

I'll place the main meat area on an upper zone for better & clear detailing it, controlling the highlights with development. The scene average seems too darks, anyway.
Have to study the scene carefully, to not permit the main subject - the meat itself to "blend" with the background,


Cheers,

Renato

[jp]

You could put the filters over the lights. It would help you see how colors light the subject and allow you to blend green in one direction and white light in another for example.

[Jac@stafford.net]

151519151520

Here is two samples of where I am going.. Both cases the red meat is too dark and I want more detail.

Just perfect as they are - if you wish to sell the photos to a vegan recruiting site.
The words that come to mind: grisly, forensic.

Best of luck.

[Tin Can]

I am definety not a Vegan but don't stores spray paint a lot of grey meat?

I never butchered a large animal, just one poor skinny Wisconsion rabbit. I ate him because I shot him. Then I shot animals no more. Paper is nice.

[Tin Can]

I have read a bit about photographing food and tried it a few times. Pros use a lot of tricks. Look up Food Photograghy.

A distinct and difficult speciality.

[bob carnie]

I got a great pm from a member here about trying IR sensitive 4 x 5 which sees the red spectrum of light , very good idea. Kind of makes a lot of sense to me.

[Drew Wiley]

I've eaten lots and lots of wild cottontail rabbits. It was that or starve. There were many instances when I didn't carry food as a kid wandering off into the mountains or into the canyons - just a book of matches and either a fishing rod or .22 rifle. My wife abhors the idea of me having eaten cute little bunnies, though she has no problem consuming store-bought rabbit meat. But thousands of coyotes can't be wrong. The only difference it that I skinned and cooked em first. Yummy! Almost daily I talk one of the real superstars of food photography, still making big money. It would be very interesting to apprentice with him if I were a lot younger than I am. He's gone from 8x10 chromes to digital capture, but still uses Sinar P camera, big Foba stands, Broncolor lighting etc, along with a full in-house kitchen. One of the perks is that he gets to eat a lot of gourmet food!

[bob carnie]

Drew did you ever encounter Paul Bunyon in your travels in the woods, he was my hero.

[cowanw]

I got a great pm from a member here about trying IR sensitive 4 x 5 which sees the red spectrum of light , very good idea. Kind of makes a lot of sense to me.

That would be interesting. I am going to predict that you will get black meat. infra red in not the same as red. It is in effect heat given off as a wavelength. Because IR penetrates through the skin it comes up white on people as it records the IR radiation from within. I expect room temperature meat to be the same image tone as room temperature anything else. In this web site there are colour infrared pictures of cold blooded animals.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/image_galleries/ir_zoo/index.html
I think Drew's idea of spraying a glycerin solution is a good one. The problem is similar to black animals, they need specular highlights.
Since your meat is red in the highlight surfaces and in the shadow creases (albeit different tones), filters won't distinguish one from the other.
Perhaps the appearance might be different if the butcher can cut cross grain or end grain or side grain, or saw grain or scalpel slashes
Regards

[Jmarmck]

Visable light: red=red green=green, blue=blue
False Color (IR)- Remember, you cannot see the IR so it is represented in the next closest band, Red.
So it goes like this.
Red=IR, green=red, blue=green........blue is not visible. This is partly why water (particularly clean water) in IR imagery is black, no return from any of the bands. Muddy water will be cyan (green and blue so red and green respectively)

So the red in the meat will should go to a greenish color.

[bob carnie]

There is no blue in the original scene so I am ok, and I am shooting infared BW so I assume as you are indicating I will see detail . Yes ? No

Visable light: red=red green=green, blue=blue
False Color (IR)- Remember, you cannot see the IR so it is represented in the next closest band, Red.
So it goes like this.
Red=IR, green=red, blue=green........blue is not visible. This is partly why water (particularly clean water) in IR imagery is black, no return from any of the bands. Muddy water will be cyan (green and blue so red and green respectively)

So the red in the meat will should go to a greenish color.

[bob carnie]

I wanted to consume this project afterwards - price of meat is crazy - what about spraying with an edible dye .
Is not glycerin just clear? I get the specular thing. but the meat will need to be rendered in the final print as the darkest object with detail. not a lot of specular highligh, I will leave that to the bone matter.


That would be interesting. I am going to predict that you will get black meat. infra red in not the same as red. It is in effect heat given off as a wavelength. Because IR penetrates through the skin it comes up white on people as it records the IR radiation from within. I expect room temperature meat to be the same image tone as room temperature anything else. In this web site there are colour infrared pictures of cold blooded animals.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/image_galleries/ir_zoo/index.html
I think Drew's idea of spraying a glycerin solution is a good one. The problem is similar to black animals, they need specular highlights.
Since your meat is red in the highlight surfaces and in the shadow creases (albeit different tones), filters won't distinguish one from the other.
Perhaps the appearance might be different if the butcher can cut cross grain or end grain or side grain, or saw grain or scalpel slashes
Regards

[Jmarmck]

With BW I honestly don't know. I would hazard that it would not. But if you add a green filter to increase the range of tones from the green spectrum then I cannot see how IR would bring out the reds. Again, it is just a guess.

Of course by the time you figure this out, the meat will be gray.

[Drew Wiley]

Another meat counter trick - red dye? Yeah, they do that too, even though it's illegal here. I just don't know exactly how common food dye responds to film.
Easy enough to try. But gosh, if your prints are anything like what comes over the web, a really dark print with a lot of deep tone gradation plus specular highlights
looks impressive. I only seem to get away with that kind of thing when using true old school "straight-line" films like Super-XX, Bergger 200, or Foma 200. Otherwise, I gotta overexpose then mask. Do you intend to eat the meat raw or cooked, Hannibal?

[Andrew O'Neill]

Wratten #11

[Drew Wiley]

A Wratten 11 or equivalent Hoya XO merely makes typical pan film sensitivity analogous to that of normal human vision by leveling out the minor dip in the green part of the spectrum. In other words, the effect is relatively minor. A deep green filter, on the other hand, would significantly darken the red of meat and accentuate the highlights via greater contrast. Looks like an interesting photo project, if indeed a bit Medieval.

[LabRat]

So it seems you mostly want to lighten the reds, so try a #25 or #29 red gel + warm cast lights... (I use a #29 to create a "pseudo" IR effect sometimes...)

FWIW, you better get cracking with this project, before the baby maggots start wiggling and waving at 'ya... ;-) Maybe a better winter project in a COLD studio... And don't let the neighbors see this... (Momma told 'ya, "never play with your food") :-(

Steve K

[EdWorkman]

Red filters will lighten red a lot, plus you will lose a lot of speed.
I've used yellow K2 to separate red from gray without turning the red to white

[Jac@stafford.net]

Red filters will lighten red a lot, plus you will lose a lot of speed.
I've used yellow K2 to separate red from gray without turning the red to white

Yeah, but remember the red filter is a Contrast filter which implies that it lightens compared to the rest of the colors in the frame.
.

[Doremus Scudder]

Yeah, but remember the red filter is a Contrast filter which implies that it lightens compared to the rest of the colors in the frame.

Any colored filter used with black-and-white film qualifies as a contrast filter; it will lighten its color(s) and darken the complementary color(s).

Yellow passes red, yellow and most green and blocks blue (a #12 is a minus blue filter)
Orange passes red, yellow and only some lighter green and blocks blue and dark green
Yellow-green (#11) passes mostly green and some yellow; it blocks reds and blues
Red filters pass red and often a tiny bit of yellow; they block green and blue.
A cyan filter (e.g. #44) transmits green and blue and blocks red (minus red filter)
etc.

The difference in the red, orange, yellow family is the exact cut-off point (and the sharpness of the cut); yellow cuts off just blue, orange a bit more of the spectrum into green and red eliminates green entirely. All of these will lighten red in relation to the color(s) it doesn't transmit.

With Bob's meaty situation, he'll just have to experiment to see how much lighter red he needs in relation to the other colors in the scene.

And, it could be that meat has a substantial blue component, which might make a magenta filter one to try as well if extreme lightening is needed.

(You still reading this Bob?)

Best,

Doremus

[cowanw]

It is very important to understand that the colour contrast control is only relative to other colours in the scene and that white and black are not colours in this respect. If the only colour is the colour of meat in the scene, then no filters will do anything but change exposure times.

[bob carnie]

Yes I am Doremus

I am happy with all the responses and I can see I will have to do test before the purchase at my local Butcher.

I would be interested if Drew could saunter out to the woods with his bowie knife and wrestle some grizzly for me. Could be interesting for this project.

[Jmarmck]

...or perhaps lasso a dragonfly.