As Good As It Gets with Portra 400

  After her first senior portrait session, her response was somewhere along the lines of “I love it, I love it, I love it..but let’s do more…I want more close ups!” Alright, I love doing head-shots. However, instead of shooting in 645 format like last time, I decided to change it up to shooting 35mm. Mainly to get a few more shots out of the roll.  I also lugged my large format camera with me, with a 6x6cm back. The results can be seen in the previous post.

   35mm C41 film has always been my nemesis. I never seem to get it exposed the way it’s ‘supposed’ to look (at least in my head). There are a lot of variables to this, and in order to battle them, I deployed some of the best film money can buy, my most adequate equipment and techniques, and more importantly,  a trusted lab 100’s of miles away.

There are still places locally available to develop C41, but I can never trust them. I always blame my poor results on them because of their ‘dead-ish’ chemicals. A place where you can develop a roll of film and buy a pack of tampons at the same time is not really the best place to get film developed.  So, I sent them out to the same place that does my E6 and 120 C41 film. I had my doubts while I was waiting for the negatives to come back, but the final result exceeded all expectations.

  The set up was simple. A Nikon F4 with AIS Nikkor 180mm f2.8 and/or AF Nikkor 50mm f1.4, Kodak Portra 400 135/36 courtesy of Joe, a Vivitar 285 flash and sync cord  for the pool shots. Negatives developed (dev only) by Dwayne’s Photo.