------------------------------ [EMAIL PROTECTED], on the subject of Portra 400UC mentioned his first roll showed surprisingly good skin tones, and about 1/3 or the shots were underexposed.
I'm glad to hear the skin tones are good. My first couple of rolls of people shots come back from the lab tomorrow. If the skin tones turn out well I have a feeling I'll be using this film quite often. A couple of weeks ago I shot a series of photos as a demonstration for a local photo class. I put a tripod mounted ZX-5n loaded with 400UC on my deck. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon. I set the camera on manual, f/22 and ran a shot with each of the shutter speeds from 1/2000 through 1 full second. I used f/22 because it put the "correct" metered exposure, 1/30th sec, about in the middle. So, I dropped of the roll for processing thinking I'd have a great demonstration. Between the exposure latitude of 400UC and the magic of the Fuji Frontier, I had 10 "acceptable" shots and two fairly bad ones. Frankly, if you didn't take some time to examine the 4 or 5 in the middle, you couldn't see much difference. The two on the underexposed end are pretty bad. But the remainder are all at least usable. -1 through +2 are really good. If I just handed you the 12 prints and told you to put them in order, it would take you a while. Just for grins, I re-scanned the negs myself. +1 through -1 came out just fine. +4 through -3 looked pretty usable. Of the whole set, -5 and -6 were the only ones the really looked like you couldn't pull something out of the shadows or correct the color to something believable. Keep in mind, this was a shot of a bunch of trees and bushes in the back yard. No people. I've more experimenting to do, but it's looking like very forgiving film. See you later, gs -----------------------------