> william.curwen wrote > So may I suggest that you work with colour neg stock for your on set > photography, and expose for the shadows. It will not burn out the > highlights, and a scanner - any scanner, will be able to handle the contrast > range. After that, it is relatively easy using Photoshop Curves et al, to > get the result you want.
On many good ocasions I have been able to talk with the DP of filming crews and obtained a small batch of the film they are using to shoot themselves. Using this option requires that you are ready to load that film on a clasical film loader and prepare your own rolls of film before starting to shoot. This is as close as you can get to the results the film crew will get,( if there is no heavy filtering ) specially if you can send it to process to the same labs they will process their film. Otherwise, commercial photography labs MAY process those rolls , but you have to ask. > I have done quite a bit of interior available light photography with > digicams, and it is great if you want funky colour, only you don't want > funky colour - so use film, as digital is so totally different. Please > remember that digital capture is still in its infancy, and you may be > expecting too much. However, one thing I wonder from this discusion is the fact that ,regardless of latitude. with film you are just setting a color balance tightly, that one given by the film itself and variatiaons only will come out through color filtering. Most probably you may not get exactly the same balance in a digicam, but I still wonder why is it going to be such a long departure from what you will get from equally balanced film. As the funky color is coming from such a varied mixture of lights, it will come out funky regardless of the media you shoot it with and actually "balancing" it will amount to trash the lighting scheme, as was designed by someone WHy not just set camera balance to daylight and work your way through? Basically the only way to deal with many variables at the same time is to control and fix as many as possible. Going to Automatic, or tungsten WB means just letting some extra few things out of control ( from my experience Tugnsten WB in digicams is basically bizarre!!), more than using a daylight balanced camera, specially since we are already more than trained to deal with daylight film by default. The only other option I can see here is useful only if you are shooting stills, but I mean, very still.Then , with a camera on tripod and a good assistant you can create several identical shots with diferent Custom White Balances and then blend them all in PS in Post Prod to your liking. You can also do this with different exposures to blend good shadow detail with well defined highlights. But this only relates to exposure, not color handling. Alternatively you may just need to shoot a grey card in each different lighting in full frame as to build your own collection of white balances so you can play with them during the RAW conversion. You can play with changes in color and blend some of the different results, all coming from a daylight balanced shot. Please note that I said white balance but also reccomend to use a neutral grey card, not white. However, if you are following a crew through several changes of sets and lightings this is not likely to be useful. Sorry if this does not help. Jorge Parra PS: Dear William , It's been too long since I wanted to congratulate you on your "2 million Pixel" section of your website and always forget. I found(again) your website in your signature and went again and rejoiced again with what I saw. Congrats!!! Many fellows from the Stock PhotoList would frown surprised at what can be done with a coolpix camera in the proper hands. My own post was seemingly longish.... Jorge =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
