Short write-ups on stocks, processing and the occasional failed experiment.
Pushing Portra 400 two stops in winter light
Portra 400 is famously forgiving when overexposed, so pushing it feels like going against the grain of the stock. In flat November light, though, there is often nothing else to do: 1/60 at f/2 is all the light you get on the coast after three o'clock.
Rated at 1600 and pushed two stops in C-41, the shadows lose most of their detail and pick up a green-cyan cast that needs correcting at the scan. Highlights hold up surprisingly well. The grain gets bigger but stays round and even, which we like a lot more than the blotchy noise of an underexposed negative that was developed normally.
Our rule of thumb now: push when the scene is low-contrast anyway, never when there is a bright sky in the frame. The North Sea series on the homepage is almost entirely pushed Portra.
Why we scan every frame twice
Every scanner adds its own noise on top of the film grain, and it is most visible in the dense parts of a negative. Our fix is boring: scan each frame twice at 6K, align the passes and average them.
Film grain is identical in both passes, so it survives. Sensor noise is random between passes, so it drops by roughly a third. The result reads as cleaner without the plastic look you get from noise reduction.
It doubles scanning time, which is why we only offer it for commissions and our own grain packs, not for bulk develop-and-scan orders.
Super 16 for small brand films
A 400-foot roll of Vision3 runs about eleven minutes at 24 fps. For a one-minute brand film we usually shoot three to four rolls, which is plenty of choice if the shot list is tight.
Development and a 4K scan add a fixed cost per roll, but you save on grading time: the stock already gives you the look, and we mostly balance shots rather than build a grade from scratch.
Clients get the scans as ProRes 4444 in their private gallery the week after the shoot, together with a graded edit and the raw camera rolls.
