Hi folks!
I’d love to hear experiences around shooting stills with feature film negative and trusted places where to develop it. I’ve never been good at developing myself, so I’d love to get advice for a good lab and if they could eventually do bleach bypass. I just bought some 120 film rolls from eBay that hopefully, they’re in good shape and real Vision 3 film.
Thanks!
M
I’m a huge fan of this film. I’ve also started developing it myself but to test to see if I like the look of the film I sent it to Color Lab out in Maryland. http://colorlab.com/
They scan a lot of video production Vision3 so they know what they’re doing and they’re happy to scan some stills for you too. Not sure about bleach bypass though. They’re pricey so I don’t think that you’ll want to consistently send your film to them but it’s one of the few places in the US that actually uses ECN-2 process.
I’m interested to see the results with this film processed in ECN-2 chemistry and converted with NLP. I wonder are there any benefits to 50D/250D over Portra 160/400?
Hi Rew, Thanks so much for the Colorlabs tip. I got in touch with them, it’s great that some labs are still developing bulk film for still photographers. Obviously they don’t develop the 120 rolls sliced from perforated 65mm that I bought, so I’ll need to get ready and develop those myself… Can’t wait to get on to it!
Hi Flanders! Maybe I can share some work when I have it processed. There are a bunch of guys easing this process in Germany. Check them out! See the link below. It’s well explained all they mention about movie film stocks processed in ECN2.
I’m a cinematographer, I shot miles and miles of movie film stocks mostly for commercials but also on shorts and features. In my experience, I have always missed the denser moodier look from the movie film look. I have always felt that still photo films were too contrasty and had very little dynamic range, especially in the low lights where we cinematographers used to feel more comfortable. Movie emulsions developed on ECN2 will scan beautifully because of the wider dynamic range. If you feel like giving it a try… I would also recommend not to compensate Tungsten emulsions with any filter, they would actually give you more color correcting range later in digital processing.
There’s a guy in the Negative Lab Pro Facebook Group that is doing amazing stuff ECN2 development + Negative Lab Pro… the results he is getting are so so good… let me see if I can ping him and get him to join this conversion…
Hi Nate! Totally! This is a great example of that thicker-richer-moodier look I mean. Thanks for bringing this up.
@mischalluch …thanks for the info, looking forward to seeing your results!
I’ve come across Silbersalz35 before, their results are impressive. Their profile definitely has that film-still look, very low contrast. I’m more interested in processing the film with the level of contrast/saturation that say, Portra and R-A4 paper used to produce. That’s why I wonder if there’s any benefit to using Vison3 and scanning it, over scanning Portra. I notice that an ECN2 lab has popped up in my area (always happens here once something’s trendy in the rest of the world!), so I’ll try a roll one of these days and see how it comes up.
I’ve recently moved to rolling my own vision 3 in medium format, and home developing ECN II in a jobo processor. I find with 250D the results compare well to Portra although it may not have the same tolerance for under exposure. On a sunny day I love the way it handles highlights.
The big reason for switching for me was that I get far more consistent results home developing with ECN II than I ever did with C-41. With C-41 I found that despite my best efforts to be consistent, sometimes I would end up with strange color shifts or worse mistakes.
