... Journal Entry
Views in the garden; wandering about snapping a few photos in harsh sunlight using 35mm film with a high dynamic range, CineStill 400D. Great fun.
Exposed at box speed and without any adjustment to the camera metered values at all, I was interest to see how this film would cope with these bright, contrasty, HDR scenes.
Well, the answer was rather spectacularly. The manufactures claims about this film seem to be pretty much true; "400Dynamic is a fine grain daylight balanced color negative film with a wide dynamic range with a base sensitivity of ISO 400, but can be rated from 200 to 800 and pushed up to 3200. This makes the film highly versatile, usable both indoors or in the studio, under virtually any lighting conditions".
It would indeed appear that its overexposure and , unusually for CN film, also its underexposure characteristics are exemplary.
The only thing you have watch out for with this film stock is halation. Being a movie film repurposed a stills photography film it has its remjet layer removed to allow it to be processed in standard C41 chemistry rather than movie films' specialised and expensive to access ECN2 services. Halation is a photographic effect caused by light crossing through a film emulsion and reflecting back, creating a soft glow around bright areas of an image. The remjet layer counteracts this effect so without it watch out for the "glow" around strong highlights such as street lights in nighttime scenes.
Apart from that what's not to love about this great film? Indeed most of us love that effect too!