I noted that there was a suggestion of setting shutter speed to 1-stop higher than camera’s recommendation.
If my camera suggests a shutter speed of 1/500s, does it mean I should set the shutter speed to 1/250s?
Thanks
I imagine that you are referring to the advice given by Nate in the Guide which is actually that the exposure should be one stop higher, not the shutter speed:
So yes, 1/250 sec gives twice as much light as 1/500 sec.
(You must have a bright light source?)
Whether that advice applies to your own setup depends upon how your camera is arriving at that suggested shutter speed of 1/500 sec in the first place, which metering mode are you using etc. A more reliable way (recommended by Nate) might be to base your exposure on the film rebate so that it doesn’t clip any of the colour channels, effectively ‘exposing to the right’ (ETTR).
Thanks Harry.
Indeed I am referring to the advice from the link you posted. I think the advice in the link was setting the aperture to f/8.0 and shutter speed to 1-stop higher.
I am using a JJC LED light source. It has 10 brightness settings. For one of the LED brightness settings and aperture fixed at f/8.0, my camera determined a shutter speed of 1/500. Shouldn’t I set the shutter speed to 1/250 in this instance?
I may also try the “film rebate” method later for comparison.
Thanks!
The thing is you’re not photographing a normal scene here, the maximum light hitting the sensor at any given aperture is entirely governed by the brightness of your light source and the density of the unexposed part of the film, the rebate, it’s a totally controlled environment if you like. Relying on the meter alone on aperture priority will inevitably mean that for different subjects on the actual roll of film a different shutter speed will be selected because there might be more highlights or indeed more shadows on the negative. It may be that 1/250 sec proves to be the correct shutter speed but I’m wondering how the camera came to the decision that 1/500 sec was correct, what type of image were you ‘scanning’ at the time?
I should say that like a lot of rules there will be times when you might decide to give a different exposure, perhaps you over-exposed the scene in your film camera so you have a very dense negative, there you might give more exposure, a slower shutter speed, to try and rescue the situation.
I’d say try 1/250 with an ‘average’ negative and see if you like the result that NLP gives you, maybe take a look at the histogram, then do the same for 1/125 sec, maybe even 1/500 sec. I think you’ll soon get an idea of what kind of exposure gives the best results.
When I place a new roll of film under my macro lens, I usually bracket a few shots of just the bare rebate (starting at 1/15th) until any channel starts to clip (i check this in FastRawViewer). I then back off by 1/3rd of a stop.
1/500th at f/8 sounds very fast, are you making sure to set your iso to 100? also are you even metering through a piece of film?
Thanks Sciencetistguy!.
I set ISO to 200 and metering through films.
Below is an example of histogram (without adding Stop manually):
That histogram looks good to me, it could even be 1/3 stop further away from the right edge to prevene sideffects from highlight compression that is often used in cameras.
Other than that, Nate recommends to capture all drames of a film with the very same exposure settings in order to support better results of roll analysis.