Exposure questions for Negative films- Please Help...

[pankaj purohit]

Hi Everybody,

I just want to learn again the exposure. Earlier I have asked few queries about the exposure and it helped me a lot

but as usual, after getting old and old in this passion, I got again more queries and confusions about setting the

correct exposure. I am a 35mm film user and love the films. If this is important for solving my queries I am puting my

gear information. I use a Nikon N75/F75 film SLR camera, My lenses are : 50mm f/1.8, 70-300 f/4-5.6 G and 28-80

f/3.3-5.6 G. I use Fuji Proplus 100, Kodak color 100, Kodak 400 and Fuji crystal color 400 negative films for my work

as their requirements. As I am using films so I don't get quick checking of my captures. I point out my queries

below, please have a look and help me to sort those :

 

A.>> What are Exposure compensations (EV+-)I should use in different lighting conditions, as the lighting conditions

are :

 

1.> Bright summer sunny afternoon

 

2.>Morning sunny lighting

 

3.>Sunny day but shaded subject

 

4.>cloudy overcast

 

5.>Night time long exposure (for night city scene I would also like to know the shutter speed, aperture for

capturing

the city night scene, light details and some reflections in water)

 

6.>Normal sunset time evening

 

7.>House Interior scenes

 

B.>> EV compensations for these shootings:

 

1.>Landscape area with great far object details and sharpness at sunny day

 

2.>Landscape area with great far object details and sharpness at overcast day with some dark lighting

 

3.>For getting the bright and correct colors with soft shadow details and sharpness

 

C.>> Now the final and very important question which arises very often in my mind is that, is the overexposure is

good or underexposure while using the negative films..? What happens in terms of brightness-contrast, grain and

saturation if I underexposed the film with 1 or 1.5 stops or so on, and what happens if I overexposed the film with the

1 or 1.5 or 2 or more values...? whether the overexposure or underexposure is easy, to recover than other...?

 

I recently shot 4 rolls of cityscapes and landscapes at my towns tourist palaces with green mountain surroundings

when the day was overcast with different cloud shads in the sky. But I got some grainy and dark results with lake of

sharpness at infinity. Results were not so dark, everything was looking like as it was when I scanned my rolls.

Please have a look at my this PN gallery folder where I posted 3 of those photographs with some photoshop fixings :

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=837203

 

Thanks for sharing your experienced thoughts.

[BernardMiller]

Wow. That's a lot of info. I'd love to help, but don't have time to answer all those in detail--and I'm sure plenty of other folks are in the same boat.

 

Why not just download this:

 

http://www.stacken.kth.se/~maxz/files/jiffy.pdf

 

This amazing little device will help you with oh, about 99% of all your odd exposure questions. And it's absolutely free!

[randall ellis]

http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm

 

Or you could read "Perfect Exposure from Theory to Practice" by Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz (ISBN: 0817453989) which is an excellent book on exposure concepts.

 

- Randy

[randrew1]

You can find answers to A and B in a number of hand books. As for question C:

 

As you underexpose color negative film, you start to loose shadow detail. Eventually you loose contrast and saturation and the grain increases. Most negative films will deliver a decent image at 1 stop underexposure. By the time you get to 2 stops under, most films produce smoky shadows.

 

As you overexpose, graininess decreases with no other obvious changes. If you are shooting in bright sun and happen to have 800 speed film in your camera, overexpose by 2 stops and you will get finer grain pictures (but not as good as with a quality 200 speed film). Eventually (at 4 to 5 stops over) the color correction starts to change. Flesh tones will take on a color cast that depends on the film. At 6 to 7 stops over, the contrast starts dropping.

[pankaj purohit]

Thanks Bernad and Randall for providing me the usefull links.

 

Ron, Thanks for your thoughts about the under and overexposure. I think I should have made the Q.C my basic question. I always tried to be as camera meter said to me, and some times for getting the handheld picture, I went to usnderexposure to get additional spees as knowledge about negative film exposure tellerance.

 

But here again one question in my mind that, can we always go with overexposure by about 1 or 2 stops in every kind of conditions...? As I said already, I recently shot a series of 4 rolls in a wvercast day at my town's surrounding mountains, and those are dark with lake of fine details and grainy (Please see the link in my main thread post).

 

I always thought before that I would get extra shodow details if I underexpose by 1 or more stops down, but you are saying that overexposure will help to get nice shadow details too.

 

When I started this passion, I usually used to overexpose my films and sometimes it was very huge so I used to get uncorrect colrs, than I slowly started using underexposure.

 

Please clarify this.