Fuji NPS exposure?

[tim atherton]

These days do people still expose something like Fuji NPS (8x10) at say 100 rather than 160? What's peoples experience.

(and what about something like Portra? I've heard people tend more towards the nomional speed on that).

I've never been much of a colour print person (more transparency) - but for various reasons am likely to be using some soon.

tim

[David E. Rose]

Tim, I have always used NPS at 100 ASA. I make two exposures, one at the metered value, the second at one storp more (50ASA). The lab often ends up using the second negative for printing, especially on scenes with deep shadows or low overall illumination.

[Ted Harris]

Tim,

Like you I shoo tmostly chromes but when I do shoot color negative it is usually NPS or NPC 160. I generally rate it at the nominal values from Fuji, i.e. 160. I almost always bracket by 1 or .5 stops as long as I have the time to do so. The type of scene determines which negative I go with.

[Julio Fernandez]

Tim: NPS has great exposure latitude. From midpoint it has a latitude of 1.5 stops over and 1.5 stops under. To get the most of its dynamic range I´d shoot at the midpoint, 160 ASA. NPC has very slightly greater exposure latitude than NPS, about 0.25 stops more, i.e., 1.75 stops over and 1.5 stops under. By comparison, Velvia 50´s exposure latitude is a miserly 1.75 stops, 1 stop over and 0.75 stops under. Because of the slightly greater contrast and saturation I am inclined to go for NPC in my next shoot this fall. I´d like to hear from others that have used and compared NPS vs. NPC.

[David R Munson]

I pretty much always shoot NPS these days when I'm doing color, and I always shoot it at EI 100 with no adjustment to development. I've found that I just get a better negative this way - scans better, has better tonality, contrast, shadow information, etc. I did a side-by-side comparison of a portrait image where I took two nearly-identical images in the studio, one at EI 160 and one at EI 100 for comparison purposes, and the skin tones on the EI 100 one looked a lot smoother.

I've done the same thing exposure-wise with Portra 160NC and have come up with similar results at EI 100, only with a slightly different color pallette. Both seem to benefit pretty clearly from the overexposure.

[David Kaufman]

The film speed is not the important issue--colour negative has enough latitude to accodomodate shooters at both 160 and 100. The real issue is adequate exposure for shadow values. Colour negative gains saturation and has finer grain from overexposure and has at least two to three stops latitude for overexposure. So the idea is to give adequate exposure for the deepest shadow area where you will want to print detail. Even in bright sunlight this yields excellent negatives in which shadow areas can be dodged to reveal full detail. The only situation in which this will not work is where the subject range is truly enormous--bright windows in a dark church, things that look like the mouth of a cave where you want to hold detail in bothe very light and very dark areas. Colour printing paper has a five to six stop range if you are doing RA-4 printing direct from the negative. If you are scanning the negative for digital prints, you will have even more latitude if your shadow areas have enough exposure.

[Tadge Dryja]

They make NPC in 4x5 sheets????

I just bought a box of 50 NPS sheets. NPS is pretty good, I've used it some in 35mm and have just started with 4x5. But had I known NPC was availible I definetly would have bought that. Where can you get NPC in 4x5? Neither B&H nor Adorama have it.

Is it only in quickloads? Cause then it wouldn't really be worth it... too expensive... this whole large format thing is expensive enough already.

[tim atherton]

I'm pretty sure NPC isn't available in sheets. Probably someone sneaking one of those funny little roll film backs onto the list.. :-)