Tried out Cinestill's new CS6 kit, or how I learned I'm exposing slide wrong (maybe?

[m00dawg]

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:



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).

[koraks]

As you noted, exposure is critical for making good transparencies. I personally place important highlights (that need to preserve some color/texture) at +2 2/3 stops, so close to +3 stops, and let the shadows fall wherever they may end up. If the contrast of the scene is too high for the film, this means that a lot of the scene can end up in the murky shadows, but that's just the harsh reality of positive film... Also, I personally find some loss of details in deep shadows to be much less problematic in transparencies than blown out highlights.

Btw, your sample image of the glass looks excellent indeed!

[m00dawg]

Cool sounds like I'm on the right track then! Failing to place the highlights in the right spot is likely really what's caused me the most anguish I think. I might have time this weekend to try it again and see where I land this time around.

Of note, while it's not an issue for negative films as much, knowing the total dynamic range (specifically where the highlights will blow out) for each film actually seems important. For Velvia that's around +2.5-3 I would guess? For Provia +3.5 or +4? E100 I'm not sure about yet but would guess it's the same as Provia.

At least when I shot Provia and E100 in 35mm they behaved similarly from a dynamic range standpoint though my metering in 35mm has largely been letting the camera do it (I believe I've mostly used weighted metering) and I meter on the subject to make sure it's in the middle and just see what happens.

I took portraits of the kiddo for his last day of school in large format and used a similar idea here where I just used my incident meter mode on my Sekonic. The black and white image turned out basically perfect (his face was exactly where it should be in looking at the density) but the slides were under-exposed. It was outside in shade towards the late afternoon. I waited until the sun just become hidden by my neighbor's roof.

I'm not going to subject him to more portraits But I am going to see if I can get him to stand out there again at the same time and see how the incident metering versus doing a spot meter would have changed the exposure based on what I actually shot.