[Low light] Using Analogue Film

Thanks to a shoot with the Glasgow Photo Club at the Riverside Museum, I had a chance to experiment with using high-speed analogue film in low light.

For the colour images, I tried respooled Kodak motion picture film which was designed for Tungsten/mixed lighting. To get some focussed light for faces, I tried using a small LED continuous light rather than flash. The film was exposed at EI 2000 and pushed two stops in development, which is as much as Kodak recommends.

For the black and white film, I tried Kodak's P3200 inspired by the writings of Johnny Martyr on shooting high speed film for its aesthetics. His suggestions were very useful in preparing for the shoot. It is worth having a read of his blog entries e.g., https://johnnymartyr.wordpress.com/2023/02/22/theres-more-to-shooting-3200-speed-film/.

In particular, his suggestions about exposing for the mid-tones and shooting and developing P3200 at 1600/3200/6400 to take advantage of its flexibility - rather than mixing exposure and pushing levels - was what I aimed for.

In fact the light was so low that 3200 was the lowest speed I used on this day.

The results are below. Similar to previous experiments with natural light portraits, I suspect using the pushed colour film up to an EI of 2000 with an optional conversion to BW works well if you can get away with that exposure index. For lower light levels, using P3200 at 3200 and 6400 speeds are really the only option without using flash I suspect.

I think I prefer the painterly look of the Kodak motion picture colour negative film over the P3200 BW - if the light is enough to allow 1600/2000 speeds I think that is what I''ll use in the future.

In terms of future experiments I'd like to explore two options. First using a handheld 100w LED light with a small softbox/umbrella. Second I will look to purchase an old Nikon speedlight and cable for off-camera flash that works with my F4 film cameras. This will allow me to use a ISO 400 film rather than the more expensive and grainier faster films.

Some examples of the conversion using a film setting to mimic Ilford's FPAN50 look are below.

The imagery was dramatic, with all the contrast and grain expected. I think I could learn to love it for the right situation.

Looking forward to trying EI of 1600 and 800 with the Kodak BW soon I think. It will be interesting to see if the "pull" processing does reduce the grain.