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Gross overexposure error- any hope?


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OK, I've just committed the dumbest mistake of my photographic life: I was working with a

model on a nude shoot, using FP4 rated at ISO 100, using studio flash metered for f11. After

a whole roll of excellent work on the model's part, I realized that I had forgotten to set my

aperture to f11, and had been shooting at (wait for it...) f2.0!

 

OK, now that everyone is done laughing at me, is there anything I can do to try to salvage

this roll, or should I just scrap it? We went back and recreated our earlier work (better the

second time, I think/hope), but obviously I'd like to save something if at all possible. I'll

mention that I do not do my own processing, as I usually shoot slides and digital. In fact, my

intent was to send this roll to DR5 to make B&W slides because I love their process, but that's

out the window now; I'll have to go to a local lab if I do anything at all. Fire at will. Thanks.

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Peter, that's 5 full stops of overexposure. To be honest, even with b/w print film, I don't think you can save this roll. The fact that you don't do your own developing makes it even more difficult because you have to instruct someone else on what to do.

 

You could ofcourse look at it as if it were a 'high key' shoot :-) You might still be able to produce some excellent high key prints from these negs. Just hope and pray that the recreated shots meet your standard.

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Shoot another roll of FP4 and overexpose it by five stops. Then have it developed as recommend and see if you like the results. If you don't like the results try another recommendation and repeat until you are satisfied. Then do the same with your model film.

 

Having overexposed (and not pulled) quite a lot of frames myself, I guess the roll is salvageable. But my mistakes mostly happened with Pan F, whitch is very forgiving when it comes to overexposure.

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DR5's price sheet shows that FP4's "normal" exposure is EI 64-100; while you shot it at EI 3! On the other hand, shooting it at f/2.0 will produce a nice, creamy blurred background, so you'll want to salvage the roll.

 

Besides, why are you complaining about reshooting a nude... Unless it's a guy, that is!

 

I'd suggest a Very Low contrast developer, such as Technidol or (surprise! C-41 dev). Also, Bueh has an excellent suggestion by shooting another test roll under the same conditions: Shoot a roll of 24 exposures (if you still have the lighting set up) and shoot a repeated sequence of, say, 5 shots, so the person processing can run several clip tests to experiment with different devs, since this is so far off, and you're in salvage mode.

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Thank you all for the informative answers. I had assumed I wouldn't even bother giving

this one to DR5, since their process is supposedly not very forgiving. I like the idea of

burning another roll in the same way and seeing what results I can get before writing this

one off.

 

I'm not usually such a bonehead, but I'm not afraid to laugh at my own mistakes...

 

As to DR5, I have sent a few projects to them (mostly on Scala, which was formerly my

favorite film) and I have to say the results have been breathtaking. I was originally a slide

shooter before moving to digital, but the quality of their slides is in large part what has

pulled me back to film recently. The slides have much more shadow detail than my

Coolscan V can capture.

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