7 ms·

All I can say is that neutral color negative films have more than enough range for a black person in a white dress, and any wedding photographer who had too har

All I can say is that neutral color negative films have more than enough range for a black person in a white dress, and any wedding photographer who had too hard a time nonetheless would soon find themselves no longer photographing black weddings.

klodolph 3y ago
I must emphasize that there are no “neutral” color negative films. There are just films optimized for different use cases. Once you dive into the sensitometry of how color films work, it becomes apparent that everything is a tradeoff. You have three light-sensitive layers, and you get to control their contrast curves, and you control their spectral response with sensitizing dyes. The physics and chemistry of light-sensitive materials imposes some constraints on the spectral responses of the different layers (which, if you think about it, explains why the different layers are always stacked in the same order, across different types of film). Some films are advertised as “natural colors”, like Kodak 160NC, but if you dive into it, you realize that there is no such thing as “natural colors”, there is just a certain look you get with a certain film in certain conditions. It’s not like it’s impossible for wedding photographers to shoot dark-skinned subjects at a wedding, the point is: 1. There are some difficulties inherent to the problem, 2. Your equipment (film or digital) is not configured out of the box to take good pictures of dark-skinned people. A lot of work was put into films and digital cameras to make light-skinned people look good. It’s something people care about, and various companies invested money and made it happen. It will also take work to make pictures of dark-skinned people as easy, and there are still a lot of equipment and photographers out there who are bad at it.

7 ms·

All I can say is that neutral color negative films have more than enough range for a black person in a white dress, and any wedding photographer who had too har

by staticautomatic 3y ago

klodolph 3y ago
I must emphasize that there are no “neutral” color negative films. There are just films optimized for different use cases. Once you dive into the sensitometry of how color films work, it becomes apparent that everything is a tradeoff. You have three light-sensitive layers, and you get to control their contrast curves, and you control their spectral response with sensitizing dyes. The physics and chemistry of light-sensitive materials imposes some constraints on the spectral responses of the different layers (which, if you think about it, explains why the different layers are always stacked in the same order, across different types of film). Some films are advertised as “natural colors”, like Kodak 160NC, but if you dive into it, you realize that there is no such thing as “natural colors”, there is just a certain look you get with a certain film in certain conditions. It’s not like it’s impossible for wedding photographers to shoot dark-skinned subjects at a wedding, the point is: 1. There are some difficulties inherent to the problem, 2. Your equipment (film or digital) is not configured out of the box to take good pictures of dark-skinned people. A lot of work was put into films and digital cameras to make light-skinned people look good. It’s something people care about, and various companies invested money and made it happen. It will also take work to make pictures of dark-skinned people as easy, and there are still a lot of equipment and photographers out there who are bad at it.