Photo Dopers: What should I do with this film?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently got into B&W photography and am enjoying the heck outta processing and printing in the darkroom at school. So far, I’ve only worked with B&W and a little infrared film. Upon learning of my new hobby, one of my coworkers told me that he used to be into film photography, but now he only does digital. However, he said that he had a few rolls of film that someone left with him that he’d be glad to give me.

So, he gives me 3 rolls of Fujichrome Provia 1600 film. It is, of course, color reversal film, but the box also notes that it’s for push processing. I know about push processing, but I’ve never heard of film specifically designed for it. Not only that, it’s WAY expired (back in 07/2000!). It’s been kept in a freezer, so I think it should be fine, but I’m not holding up hopes for the color being very true.

So, here are my questions:

  1. There are notes on the back that say, “E.I. 800: P-1 E.I. 1600: P-2 E.I. 3200: P-3” Does this mean that it’s actually 400 speed film, and I need to tell them what I’ve pushed it to when I get it developed?

  2. When you push B&W film, I know that it increases the contrast. Is that all it does with color, or does it make the colors different, or some other thing that I haven’t thought of.

  3. If you had three rolls of this stuff in your stash, what kind of subject would you go out and shoot?

Any thoughts or advice you have on working with this would be great. My current game plan is to shoot a roll of it off at 1600 and develop it before I shoot the other two rolls off.

2

Kodak makes a similar film, I believe it’s Ektachrome P-1600. The Kodak film is an ISO 400 emulsion that is optimized for push processing. Pushing it two stops gets you to ISO 1600. The trade off is usually between speed and grain size, faster films have larger grain size. At my camera shop they don’t see this film very much, so I make sure to tell them to push 2 stops when they process it.

I’ve used a few rolls of this film for piggyback astrophotography (mounting the camera on top of a telescope that is tracking the motion of the stars across the sky). The first couple of rolls I got really cheap because they were well beyond the expiration date, but had been stored in a freezer. I didn’t have any problems getting good results and didn’t see any problems with fogging or color balance. But, astrophotos can sometimes benefit from a bit of fogging and I usually adjust the color balance once I’ve digitized the slides.

I also shot one or two rolls of this film that was fairly fresh, and didn’t notice any difference between the fresh and expired film.

If you don’t have a telescope to mount your camera to, you might want to try taking some star trail pictures. Simply mount the camera on a tripod, frame the picture, and open the shutter for about 5 to 15 minutes. If the north star is in the frame all of the stars will appear to rotate around it, forming a series of concentric arcs. If you have something interesting in the foreground, the results can be quite nice.

Here’s a link with more detailed instructions.

3

Moe, that’s excellent advice. Thanks so much! I was actually thinking about taking out my tripod and seeing what I could capture in the night sky, so it’s good to know that I was on the right track. (Makes a mental note to go buy a cable release.) I’m assuming that I should follow the advice in the article about the exposure time, and just bracket my shots?

4

I’m not sure this is important for shooting star trails, but for piggyback astrophotography aperture can have big effect on the quality of the image. Even good quality lenses that take excellent day time photos can have a hard time taking sharp astrophotos.

For example, my 50mm f/1.4 Nikon lens gives pretty bad star images if I use it with the apreture wide open. Stars near the edge of the field turn into little smears of light and the field is not evenly illuminated. If I stop it down to f/2.8 the stars become much sharper at the edges of the frame and the picture is much more evenly illuminated.

Focus can also be critical, and is pretty hard to judge at night.

So, you might want to try a series of exposures that vary the exposure time, aperture and focus in a systematic fashion. It’s important to keep records of the exposure parameters for each frame so you can find out what works.

Good luck.