Advice needed on colour films.

[HarryW]

Hi,
I use Tri-X almost exclusively and so have very little knowledge of colour films. Whenever I need colour images for reports and technical documents etc., I use a D-Lux 3 and any minor adjustments are carried out in Aperture.
I need to take colour photographs of a Theatre from the proscenium arch looking towards the seating for inclusion in a technical document that I am writing. I have a concern that the D-Lux 3 will not be wide enough so as a back-up I will take along a 35mm film camera with a 20 mm lens and use a tripod if required to get slow shutter speeds. The Theatre will be lit and will be unoccupied. I need to get this right first time as I will not get access again for 4-5 weeks after my first shoot.
The big question is should I use colour negative or colour slide film and which of these scans best?. I have an HP4960 flatbed that can scan strips of film or mounted slides or could I depend on the scan carried out when the film is processed. The photograph will be no larger than A4 and the document will be produced from a colour laser printer.
Would appreciate receiving recommendations on film types / manufacturers.
Thanks.

Regards

Harry

 

[kshapero]

Kodak Portra 400 NC sounds like it would do the trick nicely.

 

[venchka]

Tripod. Kodak Ektar 100. Bracket. Have the film scanned at the time of developing. You can also scan. Use the best files for publication.

 

[FA Limited]

this kind of stuff is probably better done on a DSLR cuz you can fix the white balance easily.

my favourite colour film is 400H natural colours. but again these films are daylight balanced so if there is a lot of tungsten lighting, the interiors will show up a bit too warm. unless you have the right filters.

 

[Al Kaplan]

Amateur color negative films such as Kodak Gold are designed for people who don't have a clue about color temperature, daylight, tungsten light, flourescent light, or accurate exposure. They're very tolerant of mixed lighting. Like other color negative films they give finer grain with 1/2 to one stop of overexposure. To put it another way, Kodak calls ISO 250 film Gold 400. Fuji does the same thing. At any rate, since you'll be photographing an empty room and can use a tripod, bracket your exposures. Use an incident light meter. Try to include a grey card, set of color control patches, and a grey scale in at least some of your frames. They'll give you a target for zeroing in on your correct color balance.

Slide film requires spot-on exact exposure and your color balancing will require using filters on the lens and you should be using a color temperature meter. You can't do much correction from the processed transparency.

Do you have any experience in using a view camera? This would be a great situation for using 4X5 film with a 65mm f/5.6 Super Angulon. Too bad they don't make amateur emulsions in 4X5.