what film????? Negative vs. Transparency

I have been slowly getting into the business for the last year,

with my work being primarily portrait and weddings. I have come to

like using Kodak tmax 100 and 400 plus Ilford 3200 for my black and

white and have fallen in love with the Kodak UC 400 for almost all of

my colour work. My question is about using slide (transparency)

films. Does anyone use them and what is the practicality of using

them if the end result is proof prints. I have used slide (provia)

for my travel work and was consistently impressed with the colour

saturation, I am just a little confused on whether or not I should be

considering it for my portrait work also. Suggestions please!!!

 

Thanks, Sean

I have shot weddings for 25+ years and have never seen a professionally-shot slide wedding.

Slide film at a wedding is sort of like doing the NY Times crossword puzzle in ink.You would have to be supremely confident,or bracket a whole bunch to shoot slides.The color negative films designed for wedding work are low contrast and have wide exposure latitude.Color slide film has neither atribute.Color negative films can handle about a 200:1 brightness range,color slide films & color paper both have about a 40:1 range.Shooting slide films would severally limit the photographer.Usually in wedding or portrait work one tries to control their brighteness range & light ratio in order to fit then 40:1 range of the paper.

If you deliver transparencies, you shoot slide film. If you deliver prints, you shoot negative film. This is pretty much true for any type of photography.

 

Now, some wedding photographers used to shoot slide film when what they delivered was 3D stereo slides. My parent's wedding was in 1951 and their "album" is a set of 100 glass mounted stereo slides.

"what is the practicality of using them if the end result is proof prints?"

 

Check with your printer to see if he/she is familiar with

making prints from slides. Prints might turn out more expensive

and with poorer quality.

Hi folks, I have been enjoying some of the postings on this forum and think it's a great resource particularly for those entering the wedding business. In response to this posting I would beg the question- why not use slide film? I often do and if you are shooting digital you might as well be, and some! As my workflow is film capture to digital conversion I tend to like to use slide film due to the improved scanning work flow (far more accurate and extremely easy to edit). Photography is a skill that needs to be mastered, especially exposure. I don't want to turn this into a lecture but to be honest if you are afraid to shoot slide film based on fear of incorrect exposure, then you need to brush up before attempting a wedding with negs. Control delivers results period.

One advantage to using color negative film is that it has a wider exposure latitude than slide film. The wider exposure latitude means the negative film will be able to record more information from the original scene. Many people actually have a harder time scanning slides because the shadow areas are so dense but with negatives they are thin. Slide film is more contrasty which makes it harder for scanners to do well. It may be more difficult with negatives to get the color balance correct since you don´t have a color reference as with slides but that only means you have to learn how to calibrate and produce accurate color like you do in the darkroom.

The long answer is...If you are to deliver slides or scan these slides on a drum scanner - shoot slide film, otherwise don't get close to it.

Slide film gets very dense easily, is very expensive to get decent prints from it and do not scan well on anything but a multi thousand dollars drum scanner.

I guess the short answer is "get a good wedding negative film" - period.

<p>I'm pretty good at getting good exposures, but the tolerance for error on trans is zero. For years in commercial environments we always shot trans, but we always proofed with polaroid and bracketed the exposure to within 3rds of a stop at least. I have never know a shooter who could expose correctly enough to do a wedding on trans. Every slight mistake would yield an unprintable piece of film. </p>