Digital versus Film

Film

In portrait photography your choice of film is very important. Today, there is an incredibly wide choice of professional and amateur films. Some films have been specifically manufactured for portraiture by optimising skin tones. Often a photographer will not choose film until just a few minutes before shooting.

It is important to familiarise yourself with one or two 'favourites' so that they become like old reliable friends to you. You get to understand their strengths and weaknesses. You can predict how they will react when you overexpose or overdevelop them. You know what the colour will be like using street lighting and you have utmost confidence that they will record your images each and every time.

There are essentially four categories of films from which to choose:

1.    Colour Print (Colour negative)
2.    Colour Slide (Colour positive)
3.    Black and White Print (B & W negative)
4.    Special Purpose (Infra red etc)

Colour print film Today's films are very forgiving when it comes to exposure. Over or underexposure by one to two stops still provides most negatives sufficient detail to render a good print. If the subject you are shooting is in a flat, low-contrast location you can choose a film that high colour saturation and enhanced colours. Alternatively, if you are indoors or in a very low light situation, instead of resorting to on-camera flash that will kill the 'mood' of the shot, you can choose a high-speed film to capture the image and the mood. My standard portrait film is Kodak Portra 400NC. Rated at 400 ISO it has excellent low light performance with accurate skin tones and good colour saturation. Here are a few others. Films in italics are designated as amateur films.

Black and white film has returned to favour in recent years. Many people admire the black and white and sepia portraits from the early 1900's. Interestingly enough, wedding and portrait black and white prints from the 1920's through to the 1950's are often in much better conditions than colour shots taken in the 1960's and 1970's. Many early colour prints faded and changed colour leading to an expansion of the restoration industry

Even today people recognise the unique attraction of black and white prints. Apart from the aesthetic advantages, there are two technical advantages of black and white over colour. Firstly, a black and white print has the ability to reproduce a wider range of tones. And secondly, its archival performance will almost certainly outlast that of colour. XP2 has particularly good scanning characteristics for digital manipulation. And it can be processed in the C41 process the same as colour negatives.

Colour slide films are possibly the least suitable for portraiture. They are certainly the least forgiving when it comes to exposure. If you use slides and you get the exposure absolutely right in the skin tones, the results for portraiture can be quite spectacular, with razor sharp images, brilliant colour saturation and archival quality.

To summarise, the favoured option is colour print film. Generally, the skin tone quality is superior and the cost of producing prints is considerably lower than printing from slides. However, the main advantage of colour negative film is how forgiving it is to exposure errors. It is quite possible to be one or two stops overexposed and still producing stunning portraits! This is a huge advantage for the portrait photographer. It is far more important for the photographer to be communicating with the subject to capture the personality of the subject than to be mulling over exposure calculations and intricate adjustments to photographic equipment.