the changing bag

Everyone online seems to agree that Portra wants to be overexposed by a stop or two. I wanted to find out what happens if you ignore that advice, partly out of stubbornness and partly because in December the light round here is gone by half past three and I did not have a stop to spare.

So from November to the end of December I loaded the Olympus with Portra 400, set the meter to 400 and left it there. Five rolls in total, all metered with the camera's centre-weighted meter and no compensation except for the obvious backlit scenes.

The results

Honestly, they are fine. The lab scans have a bit more grain in the shadows than the overexposed rolls I shot last summer, and the skin tones lean slightly green under streetlights, but nothing I would call a failure. Overcast daylight frames are almost indistinguishable from the summer ones once I had corrected the white balance.

Where box speed really showed was in mixed light: shop windows at dusk, the inside of the bus, a pub with one lamp. Those frames are muddy in the darker half. Another stop of light would have helped, but another stop would also have meant a shutter speed I cannot hand-hold.

What I would do differently

I would still rate it at 400 in winter, but I would meter for the shadows instead of letting the camera average everything. And I would stop expecting a 400-speed colour film to behave like HP5 pushed to 1600. It is a different tool. In the dark months the black and white film comes out again.

The best frame of the lot is a boring one: frost on the allotment shed roof at about ten in the morning, low sun, completely flat greys and one rusty corner. It is in the contact sheets, sort of.

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