m00dawg
8-Jun-2020, 20:00
When Cinestill announced their CS6 kit, I was pretty interested. I know there's already home E-6 kits but the Dynamic developer I found very interesting, along with the fact you can buy the chemicals separately instead of having to buy full kits.
My impressions of it are that it won't prevent you from making huge mistakes with slide, but when you nail it, it's really good. For example:
204552
That was with Provia. My E100 tests all fell flat because I underexposed my film quite a bit in some of the shots. As an aside, being able to dev E-6 at home certainly has CLEAR benefits for learning slide since if I had processed some of these sooner, I may have discovered my mistakes.
And onto those mistakes...I had a number of slides that are super dense which initially confused me. For some of these, I also took C-41 and BW (T-Max 100 specifically) and the C-41 and BW turned out beautiful using equivalent exposures, but the slides tended towards super dense. Not all the time but often enough to result in some unusable sheets.
Which got me to thinking...I know with slide you can easily blow out the highlights, but you're also competing with density. Is it correct to say I shouldn't blow out my highlights but I SHOULD place the highlights I do have "towards the right" up near where the max for the highlights?
For instance, if I had a scene that was say only 3 stops and I'm using Provia (which is somewhere around 7 stops as I recall?) If I expose for the middle, my highlights won't reach up where the slide would get thin and I may get a dense negative correct? Instead I should shift my exposure by 3-4 stops in this case to make sure the highlights are placed correctly?
I'm hoping that's what I'm doing wrong because if it's not, I have no idea why I'm getting such crazy results, unless it's the dev kit. But since I did get some truly awesome slides from the same dev run, I have to think it's more my process.
Back to CS6 (as an aside, I'm not a fan of the name), I'm not sure yet about the dynamic developer, but it's hard to judge given my exposure issues. I will say that image above rendered exactly how I remembered it so I think there's still something to it (they also have the standard E-6 1st developer, which they call Daylight).
My impressions of it are that it won't prevent you from making huge mistakes with slide, but when you nail it, it's really good. For example:
204552
That was with Provia. My E100 tests all fell flat because I underexposed my film quite a bit in some of the shots. As an aside, being able to dev E-6 at home certainly has CLEAR benefits for learning slide since if I had processed some of these sooner, I may have discovered my mistakes.
And onto those mistakes...I had a number of slides that are super dense which initially confused me. For some of these, I also took C-41 and BW (T-Max 100 specifically) and the C-41 and BW turned out beautiful using equivalent exposures, but the slides tended towards super dense. Not all the time but often enough to result in some unusable sheets.
Which got me to thinking...I know with slide you can easily blow out the highlights, but you're also competing with density. Is it correct to say I shouldn't blow out my highlights but I SHOULD place the highlights I do have "towards the right" up near where the max for the highlights?
For instance, if I had a scene that was say only 3 stops and I'm using Provia (which is somewhere around 7 stops as I recall?) If I expose for the middle, my highlights won't reach up where the slide would get thin and I may get a dense negative correct? Instead I should shift my exposure by 3-4 stops in this case to make sure the highlights are placed correctly?
I'm hoping that's what I'm doing wrong because if it's not, I have no idea why I'm getting such crazy results, unless it's the dev kit. But since I did get some truly awesome slides from the same dev run, I have to think it's more my process.
Back to CS6 (as an aside, I'm not a fan of the name), I'm not sure yet about the dynamic developer, but it's hard to judge given my exposure issues. I will say that image above rendered exactly how I remembered it so I think there's still something to it (they also have the standard E-6 1st developer, which they call Daylight).